I had never heard of Nikki Gemmell before receiving this book. She wrote two books before this one and it was written in 2001. I will have to see if I can find any others by her because I was very impressed with Love Song.
Written in the first person as an explanation of the narrator’s life to her unborn child, the first paragraphs snag the reader and hardly let go until the end. Lillie Bird was raised in a religious community in Australia named Sunshine although her parents were outsiders. Her father bought the local newspaper before Lil was born and he and Lil’s mother have made their life there. Lil’s mother, Rebecca, came to Australia from England and fell in love with Tiriel and never went home. Tiriel was a drug user and wannabe journalist but when they moved to Sunshine he cleaned himself up. Lillie seems to have always felt like an outsider in Sunshine. She reads books and isn’t much good at athletics and doesn’t talk much. Then, at age 13, she was sentenced to never leaving her parents’ property until she became an adult for the crime of starting a fire in the local school. Other than her parents the only person she had contact with was Edith Jansun, the local librarian. Ed, as Lil calls her, brings her new books and magazines and talks to her. Although most young girls would consider this a punishment Lil was quite happy to stay home. Or at least she was until she turned 21 at which point she was supposed to be free. However, the people of Sunshine still don’t want her sullying their town and it looks like Lil might become a permanent recluse. She is wild to discover the world and especially to discover men. Finally her parents come up with a solution. Lil will go to England to stay with her maternal grandfather, Cedric, for six months. Lil has never met Cedric but anything that gives her a way out of Sunshine is okay with her. England is the Promised Land for her.
Gemmell has a knack for description whether it be people or the land or clothing or sex. Take this paragraph from when Lil first arrives in London:
Greedily I stare out at that new world with both palms pressed to the car window, stare at the sea of heads on footpaths and the people threading between stilled cars and gliding off the backs of buses like practiced ballerinas and holding cupped palms for coins and thrusting umbrella sticks at taxis and deep in mobile talk and I imagine myself striding through it, long for that. Stare a streaks of grime and scrawls of graffiti and herdings of rubbish by old tired doors and the smiling will not be wiped, for in twenty-four hours the whole tone of my living has been grubbied, gloriously so.
True to the title this book is about love but you’ll have to read it to find out more. ( )