“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” Lowell told me once, and I had to stop myself from pouring petrol over his shoes and lighting it up right there and then. [p. 59]
Iris, with her mother Hannah and her stepfather Lowell, has returned to England to see her father Ernest, who's dying. "You and me and his millions are all he's got," says Hannah gleefully. Iris can barely remember her father; she's had a row with her best friend Thurston (who first meets Hannah dressed as, well, Hannah: nobody suspects that he's a teenage runaway and petty criminal) and can't contact him. She does not want to be uprooted from her life. Never mind the acts of arson she's committed ...
Ernest turns out to be a delightful character, under no illusions about his ex-wife but longing to reconnect with his daughter. It turns out Hannah hasn't been wholly honest with Iris: how Iris discovers this, and how Ernest circumvents Hannah's greed, is the core of the story.
Iris is a complex protagonist, and Hannah an utterly villainous antagonist. (She too has some complexity, mostly revealed in Ernest's anecdotes about their life together. ) I would have liked more Thurston, but Iris' yearning to fix things between the two of them, and her gradual realisation that she knows very little about her friend, is beautifully written.
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