The Queen of Bloody Everything by Joanna NadinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Dido Sylvia Jones is six years and twenty-seven days old when she moves from London squat to suburban Essex and promptly falls in love with Tom Trevelyan, the boy next door. It's not just Tom that Dido falls for, though: it's also his precocious sister, Harry, and their fastidious, controlling mother, Angela. Because Angela is everything that Edie—Dido's own mother—is not. And the Trevelyans are exactly the kind of family Dido dreams of: Normal.
Dido wants to be normal more than anything else in the world. But it's the very thing that Edie can never be, as Dido—and the Trevelyans, including Dido's beloved Tom—will eventually learn the hard way.
Like the very best families, Joanna Nadin's The Queen of Bloody Everything is funny, warm, tender and heartbreaking in equal measure. Part love story, it's ultimately about mothers and daughters: about realizing, however long it takes, that family might be what you make it, but you can't change where you come from.
I loved this book. It's written from Dido's perspective as she talks to her Mother (Edie) who is in hospital. They are in their 40s and 60s respectively but the story charts their relationship from when Dido was a child. It's a difficult relationship - an alcoholic single parent, a child desperate to fit in and feel "normal".
Dido starts the story with the day that changed her life when, aged 6, Dido and Edie moved into an inherited house in Saffron Walden and meet the Trevelyan family. Moving through the decades we follow Dido and Edie along their troubled pathways.
I found the book easy to read. Sad at times, funny at others but believable. It's the author's first adult book but hopefully not her last.
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Not heard of the book but it does have an interesting story line.
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