Deborah Kay DaviesReseñas

I appreciate what it takes to envision and create a story such as this; but it wasn't very fulfilling read for me.

I don't know what I just read. Reasons She Goes to the Woods by Deborah Kay Davies is presented in a series of vignettes and is about a girl called Pearl. Each right hand page (in my copy) is a vignette from Pearl's young life, headlined by a brief chapter heading or title on the opposite page. This makes for a quick read, but the vignettes are heavy and force you to consider what's really going on.

Pearl is a troubled girl and I found myself wondering if she's a sociopath, psychopath or suffering from antisocial personality disorder. Perhaps she's just evil? The author's lyrical writing style put me immediately in mind of Sundial by Catriona Ward, in her ability to create an incredibly creepy young girl. When reviewing Sundial earlier this year, I wrote that it was a 'slow burn, disturbing and unsettling read with a hostile undercurrent' which readily applies here.

The prose in Reasons She Goes to the Woods is spellbinding, and Pearl's visits to the woods are full of evocative nature writing which did well to offset some of the tougher scenes. Meanwhile, there is a constant underlying feeling of menace and mounting dread about what Pearl will do next.

Some of Pearl's childhood antics are relatable, and I especially enjoyed the eating competition:

"I will choose two items of food for each of you, she explains, you have to eat them without throwing up. They all think this is a great idea, and start boasting to each other about how they are never, ever sick." Page 133

Pearl chooses a 'blob of corned beef and a teaspoon of cough medicine for Fee', while the kids load up the spoon for Pearl:

"Soon the big spoon is towering with, among other things, a soft sprout, peanut butter, a slick of Vick's rub, a prune and a crumbled stock cube." Page 133

I could totally relate to this game, although in my day it was a tablespoon of soy sauce, a tablespoon of Vegemite or a full glass of water. What fun!

Published in 2014 and going on to win various awards, Reasons She Goes to the Woods by Deborah Kay Davies is literary horror and while the writing is spectacular, I can't say I enjoyed reading it. The lack of dialogue punctuation and page-long paragraphs certainly irritated and Pearl is a sensual and disturbing character. Those who remember watching The Good Son (starring Macaulay Culkin) will be shocked to find Pearl is even worse.

I borrowed Reasons She Goes to the Woods by Deborah Kay Davies from the library and I'll be glad to send it down the return chute and on to the next reader intrigued by the sinister yet alluring blurb.

I really did expect more from this book. I read it in a few sittings and sadly I wasn't that impressed with it. To be honest, it was really quite disturbing...and I really don't think it was my cup of tea at all, which is a real shame as I thought it initially had some promise.
One of the laziest endings too.
It's a no from me.

This short novel is a treatise in the dangers of obsession and psychological trauma. The main character is nameless as is the town in which she lives. There are paragraph breaks but no quotation marks. The reader lives in this woman’s head with her, and any reasonable person is alternately disgusted by her and pitying her.

She becomes so immediately swept up with a man she knows nothing about who treats her like an object, an annoyance, a means to other ends. He disappears for weeks at a time, and she thinks about him constantly. She is sexually attracted to him and obsessed with getting him to love her. As time goes on, she is more and more willing to prostrate her body and her mind to his whims.

Eventually she loses everything - her friends, her parents, her job, her health, her money, even her furniture. Yet she still craves his attention and affection. It is sad and sick and frustrating. Both of them treat her without respect.

In the end, she decides her only way to be finished with him forever is to put an end to him.

There is no doubt that this is a triumph of format; in 124 vignettes Pearl grows from an odd infant being rather casually raised in a household touched by both poverty and insanity and just possibly a touch of sexual abuse, to a dangerous young woman. The years slip by seamlessly marked by the seasons or by rites of passage (Pearl goes to the beach, Pearl has her period) but Pearl remains fixed on one goal to the exclusion of everything else

So stylistically this works - but I am not sure that it does as a story. Its a long time since I have been either child or teenager, but the power Pearl appears to hold over her female friends and her gang is hard to understand. Surely, at some point someone realises that its more fun and eminently safer, to leave Pearl at home. At some point her adored, but obviously rather dopey father, would have discovered her stratagems against her mother. At some point, someone is calling family services

So its engagingly written, but more admirable for how its written than what it says

True Things About Me by Deborah Kay Davies is a novel about a self-destructive young woman. The unnamed protagonist is an intensely self-involved and unstable woman who becomes involved with a man she meets in the benefits office where she works. It's a terrible relationship with a dangerous man, and both her parents and her best friend are unable to keep her from seeing him. Her behavior becomes increasingly erratic as the novel progresses and it's clear that she's even less in control of herself than her exterior behavior indicates.

This isn't a book for everyone. Told from inside the head of the protagonist, the novel is disturbing and, as her behavior and thought patterns become less and less reasonable, the reader is forced to endure her disequilibrium right along with her. The writing is good and the author's willingness to dive into dark places was impressive.½

Deborah Kay Davies is one of those writers who does dark brilliantly. Her first novel 'True Things About Me' was disturbing yet unputdownable – about a thrill-seeking young woman who gets into an abusive relationship. Her second novel, the Baileys longlisted 'Reasons She Goes to the Woods' is also disturbing and unputdownable…

It’s about a child, Pearl, and her family. There’s her little brother The Blob, there’s her mother and her beloved Daddy. The book’s blurb quotes from the nursery rhyme There was a little girl, (which was actually written by Longfellow, I found out!). "When she was good, She was very, very good, And when she was bad she was horrid."

Except that Pearl is more often horrid than good. She’s an experimenter on other people – when she gets found out, they don’t like it – especially her mother who punishes her. She hides in the woods behind their house. It soon becomes clear that the mother has mental health problems, and Pearl gets blamed, and as she grows up and becomes a teenager, her experiments get nastier, and her mother carries on getting worse. Her poor beloved Daddy is beside himself with worry.

Some might say that the outcome of the novel is predictable given Pearl’s seeming single-mindedness in her actions; the route to get there though is not so obvious and builds up gradually over the course of the book. The author, tells the story with a great deal of style. Although the book is nominally 250 pages long, only half the pages contain the story. Each pair of pages contains a one or two word heading on the left, and then a single paragraph that fills the page on the right. So the book is only really about 120 pages long. Each right hand page is a vignette recounting one snapshot of Pearl’s life, moving from primary school through to teenage years. The extract below is the last third of the first of these little stories that make up the whole:

"The living room is quiet. In the entire world there is only Pearl and her father. Her mother laid a fire before she went out; taking ages, leaving instructions, dropping things, then slamming the door and coming back. Now Pearl listens to the sounds coming from the grate as the flames lick each other and purr. From the place pressed against her father’s knee she feels a rippling sensation move through her body, as if a delicate, frilled mushroom were expanding, elongating, filling her up. She exhales slowly. She mustn’t disturb him. He would push her off with his beautiful hands if he woke up."

Told in the present tense, there is a dreamy otherworldliness about Pearl’s actions that belies the fact that a lot of what she does is downright nasty. It’s clear that the mother-daughter relationship never happened and that she idolises her father. She also has a controlling relationship with her few friends, and The Blob too of course. After all, Pearl only wants one thing …

Deborah Kay Davies has again probed the dark side of relationships – different ones this time. I wonder where she’ll go for her next novel? As I said at the top, this book is disturbing and unputdownable, an uneasy but thought-provoking read. (8.5/10)

I heard about this on John Mullan's Culture Show special for World Book Night and was intrigued by what they had to say. In particular, I was interested in the way they all seemed hugely impressed with it, and yet also that there was something not quite right about it.

This novel has been called 'The Bell Jar' for the 21st century. I know the 'Bell Jar' apostles out there are having trouble with this comparison but, personally, I think this is a really apt and useful comparison.

The narrative is essentially the first person narrative of a young woman who is quietly (at first) coming unraveled. We meet her at the point when things are starting to seep out and be noticed by others, and at the point where she falls madly (with a capital madly) in love with an unsuitable Svengali figure, and it's pretty much all downhill from there.

In many ways, this novel does a much better job than The Bell Jar, of conveying the sense of an alienated and isolated character spiraling out of control. Unfortunately, this means that as a reader, you can sometimes feel alienated and isolated from the character. At the same time, Davies manages to convey the worry and shock of those around the narrator, even though this is all filtered through her obliviousness to how far things have gone wrong.

The main problem for me was that, unlike the Bell Jar, no real thesis is advanced as to the how/why of what's happening - although, the more I thought about it, the more it struck me that perhaps, in a post-Bell Jar world, we don't need telling twice.

This novel is ambitious, technically brilliant, insightful, disturbing but not an easy read. But I am off to see what else she has done, and am very much looking for what she does next.

This is the graphic and violent story of a fragile young woman's descent into madness at the hands of an abusive boyfriend. I found it gripping but hardly revolutionary. The best part about it is that the victim is the narrator so it feels quite authentic and immediate.

I am not sure if this is a book that anyone enjoys. It is frustrating, jumpy, unfocused and fragmented, however I suspect that is deliberate style choice. It is a short book which is just as well because I could not put it down. You often want to scream at the unamed lead and I would certainly not call her brave.

It is uncomfortable but gripping reading and I cannot wait to read her next book.½

The book is well-written - almost no clumsy sentences and paragraphs that make you wonder where the editor is. Unfortunately the pretty good prose is used in a book that simply does not work for me. I have no issues with graphical sex or violence - when they serve the story being told. There seems to be another story somewhere under all the gore but it gets lost in huge parts of the book. If the purpose of the book is to shock then the book is successful. But if the idea was to tell a story, it fails badly - we have the story but it's not the main star of the book.

I would still check the author's next book though - maybe a different theme would help.½

Mixed feelings. , like the curate's egg, good in parts does not merit the blurb's over sold comments and as one of the other reviewers has already commented nowhere near the level of the Bell Jar

While I can't say that the quality of writing is poor, I can't actually say anything particularly good about this book and I think the comparison to the Bell Jar on the cover is truly unwarranted. The story is depressing, the characters are not terribly beleivable and it generally left a bad taste in my mouth.

True Things About Me is Deborah Kay Davies’ debut novel.

Plot:
The narrator of this book is a young woman who basically has a psychotic break that’s triggered by an abusive relationship. We follow her from her first meeting the guy into the depths of mental illness.

True Things About Me is a very well written, very depressing and disturbing book. It was quite different from what I expected (though the blurb that it was the new Bell Jar could have warned me) but once I got used to that, it was quite gripping.

More about it on my blog: http://kalafudra.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/true-things-about-me-deborah-kay-davie...

The narrator of the story works in a benefits office, interviewing claimants. The writing quickly leads the reader straight into the story, with a woman complaining about prostitution and dodgy goings on in the house next door. Clearly she is spending a lot of time observing what she is complaining about, and that sets the tone for a novel which casts the reader as voyeur, observing something really distasteful but not being able to look away.

An interview with a claimant turns into a rough casual sex encounter, and the heroine can't resist pursuing him for more - but this is no romance, it's a nasty, brutally violent relationship. Her friend Alison is rightly concerned about her, yet she allows her to babysit a very young baby for her - why? She stops going to work

Deborah Kay Davies writes very well, and this kept me reading, but I really disliked this book. It's not the explicit sex I have problems with, it's the explicit violence (and the explicit sexual violence).

I hated this book but because of the quality of writing, I would be interested in seeing what she writes about in her first book, a collection of short stories - I will read some pretty dark stuff but don't want to read about such a self destructive character and about the brutality and degradation depicted here.

I didn’t like this book, but I did find it unputdownable! It’s the story of a bad relationship seen through a young woman’s eyes.

A man recently released from prison sits down at the desk of a young woman, a bored worker in a claimant’s office. She is seduced by his swagger and attitude, and later lets herself get picked up, submitting readily to a bout of dangerous sex in a car park. Over the next weeks and months, she wants more, and she gets it – but at a cost. Apart from steadily alienating her friends, parents, boss and co-workers, she deludes herself that it’s the real thing, sacrificing more and more of her life in what will become abusive relationship...

"Alison’s not my friend any more, I said out loud to the echoey loo. It’s official, I now have no friends. Even my parents hate me. I watched my silly smile fade in the mirror. As I combed my hair I thought maybe it was all part of the scheme of things. I had to grow up sometime. No one really understood. They all thought they knew what was best for me. I had started a new chapter. I was living with a man, for holy Saint Ikea’s sake. I was moving on. I was cooking stuff in my kitchen at last. Someone was occupying the empty side of my double bed. I felt equal to it all. But round the back of my little heart I could hear a lonely breeze whistling away everything I cared about."

Told by the un-named young woman, we really get into her mind. Outwardly she has all the trappings of a comfortable middle-class life; she loves her Mum and Dad, has her own flat, spends too much on her credit-card, and is slightly envious of her best friend Alison who is already married with a family. But emotionally, she’s not matured beyond adolescence, still likes to get ‘trollied’ at the weekends, and is unable to realise the consequences she’s set in motion until it’s too late. As for him – well he had ‘user’ tattooed on his forehead, but she couldn’t see it – while we may start off thinking silly cow, we do end up pitying her for her poor choices.

Written in short and punchy sentences in the first person, there is a good momentum, and the author has really given her protagonist a voice. While the plot may be slightly predictable, the way it is told made this novel an excellent read – we are emotionally manipulated all the way to the climax. A young author to look out for methinks. While I didn’t like this book, I did read it in one unputdownable session.½

This is a difficult book to review. I thought it was very well-written and liked the pace and style. The author's insight into the mind of her main character is astounding. However, it is also quite disturbing, and I did find it hard to empathise with any of the characters. Overall, I can't say I enjoyed the book, but I did appreciate it and it did make me think. It will also stay with me - and that is something I couldn't say for many books I have enjoyed.½

“This is the story of a woman brave enough to risk it all” says the blurb, which makes Deborah Kay Davies’ debut novel True Things About Me sound like some kind of dramatic, bodice-ripping romance or courageous struggle against adversity. It’s the kind of nonsense I’d expect to find on a Barbara Cartland or Mills & Boon… and it does little to prepare the reader for this disturbing insight into the mind of a woman on the verge of breakdown, lured into an abusive, destructive relationship. I’m not entirely sure what drives the heroine to follow this path. Is she so bored with her life she’s looking to spice it up with danger? Is it the irresistible allure of the bad boy? Or does she have such a poor self-image that any attention is better than none? Davies never makes it entirely clear, though I suspect it’s a combination of all three. Despite this question the novel remains frighteningly plausible and Davies carefully balances the darker moments with unexpected humour and a quirky world view that makes our self-destructive narrator a strangely endearing character throughout. You may well cheer when she finally takes positive action to extricate herself from these dire circumstances… but you may also wonder why it’s taken her so long.

“The story of a woman brave enough to risk it all”? Or a woman stupid enough to not know what’s good for her? You decide…½

It was painful to read how the narrator's life went off the rails after meeting a man who turns out to be every woman's worst nightmare.
At the start of the book I felt so much empathy with the narrator, then as the story progressed I felt angry at how she let herself be treated in such a horrible way. The book is fairly short, but it lingered in my mind for a long time after finishing it.

Though the story was tragic, it was never overwhelmingly depressive. There was plenty of (dark) humour to relieve the misery.

My only objection was the ending. I don't want to give anything away but I was hoping for a different resolution to the story.

If you're looking for a well-written, interesting, literary read, this is it. I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone due to some of the graphic sexual scenes - I know for a fact my mum would not enjoy reading this.

This is a disturbing read. It's the tale of a woman's life spiraling out of control after she has a chance meeting with a nameless man at her work place. A sleezy sexual encounter in a car park with the nameless man leaves the equally nameless woman obsessing about him, contacting him and quickly becoming involved in an abusive relationship with him. The more he abuses and debases her, the more she chases him. Strange people invade her house and take advantage of her.

The anonymous narrator places relationships with friends and family at risk and neglects her job and herself. It's a sad decline that the reader is privy to in all its horrible detail. I agree with the previous reviewer about the graphic sexual scenes - this was't what I expected and certainly isn't for everybody; and neither are the graphic scenes about the abusive way the main character is treated. I found reading about both of these issues equally hard going. It's not an easy read and sometimes I felt like I was invading the diary of someone suffering from a serious mental illness. Having said that, if an author can make the reader feel like this, it is testimony to the quality of the writing.

There are some light moments in the book - hitting other people's children with a French stick may not be everyone's idea of funny, but it made me laugh. The chapter titles are clever and again add to the quality of the writing.

Overall a dark book, well written but with some startlingly graphic moments.

True Things About Me is told by an unnamed narrator, a young woman in freefall whose chance encounter with an unnamed man at work leads to a downward spiral in her life.

Much of the story is vague, we don't learn names, we aren't told what her job is although it is implied, we aren't sure where she lives, how old she is or any real details of her life.

The story starts with the narrator at work interviewing 'claimants' and meeting the mysterious man, recently released from prison. Later as she leaves work with a friend the man is waiting for her and against her friends advice she agrees to go with him, willing to do anything he asks.

After a sexual encounter in a public car park she becomes obsessed by the man and uses the information he gave her at work to track him down, leaving notes and messages. After this he appears and disappears from her life at various intervals, leaving her increasingly confused, obsessed, depressed and injured, her job hanging in the balance and her family and friends distressed and worried about her. It becomes apparent to the reader that she is suffering from some sort of mental breakdown triggered by her meeting the man but again it is unclear if she has previously suffered from mental health issues, although there are allusions to her always being, as one workmate comments, "on her own planet."

With his treatment of her becoming increasingly violent and abusive there are some inevitable plot twists before the end of the book but none that can't be anticipated.

The story moves quickly, the chapters are short and well written, the story can be compelling but the graphic descriptions of increasingly abusive sex will certainly put off a lot of readers and I have to admit it wasn't quite what I expected when I requested the book. Each of the chapter headings comprise of one of the 'True Things' the narrator choses to tell us about herself. It took me less than a day to read the entire book because of the short, fast paced chapters.

But what was interesting was the spiral of depression and destruction experienced by the lead character, her doomed attempts to end the relationship and get her life back on track, swiftly followed by more self destructive behaviour and her eventual struggle to regain control of her home and her life.

The cover of the book certainly would have attracted me in the bookstore and I know it's a book I would have bought if I hadn't been lucky enough to receive this copy through LTER's. But I feel the cover description is misleading and not entirely relivant to the story and the quote on this edition "A bell jar for the 21st century" isn't quite how I would describe it.

None of the characters are especially likable and for me that made it hard to care about them. I would have liked to see a little bit more of the narrator before she met the unnamed man, if only to make it clear to the reader if she was already in the grip of a mental health issue or if meeting him were the trigger.

However I would read more by this author and would cautiously recommend the book but not to everybody.

Our nameless heroine meets the eyes of a nameless blond chap whilst at work for some kind of benefit agency. Shortly after work they have brief nasty sex in the underground car park. Then our heroine's life spirals out of control. I found it difficult to empathize with the main character, but was dragged along none the less. The short chapters help give a sense of urgency and it's difficult not to want to see how things turn out. I was alternately cursing the female lead for her submersion in the blond man's world and hoping that this time she'd break the spell.
It is definately a gripping read, but some of the back cover blurb is hyperbole. An undemanding & thrilling read that might leave you asking uncomfortable questions.

Just received this, will add to my reading pile and review it soon.