The Doll Funeral reads like a grown-up version of a magical tale, if a bit laboured, Patricia Thwaites finds.
THE DOLL FUNERAL
Kate Hamer
Faber & Faber
By PATRICIA THWAITES
Ruby, the engaging main character in this book, is met in the first few pages when she discovers, on her 13th birthday, she's adopted, news she greets with delight.
Her adoptive parents, Barbara and Mick, have had negative controls over her life, Mick by using his fists and Barbara by colluding in the subsequent cover-up processes. Since this discovery, her mission is to trace her birth parents by any means she has at her disposal.
Ruby has special powers. She communicates with dead souls. The main one is "Shadow'', who provides a commentary on her life, which sometimes gets its own small chapter. For the rest, the book follows an increasingly common formula, with dated flashbacks heading each section. The main sections follow Ruby's present life and they alternate with ones following her birth parents and the reasons she is in her current dilemma.
The Doll Funeral reads like a grown-up version of a magical tale. I felt sad for Ruby and the terrors she encountered at home, but I found her undead friends annoying extras. I like real people, real situations, characters who may give me an insight into believable human experiences that I mightn't ordinarily encounter.
Kate Hamer's first book, The Girl in the Red Dress, was a Sunday Times bestseller. I hadn't read it, but after seeing it had been nominated for several awards, I was hoping for something extraordinary from this second one. Instead, after an initial spurt of interest, I found myself labouring through it.
What eventually carried me through to the end was the sometimes lyrical quality of the writing and the desire to know how all the presented problems would be resolved.
Patricia Thwaites is a retired Dunedin schoolteacher.
