2023/076: Ghostbird — Carol Lovekin

The undergrowth began to draw in the light, making the air feel heavy. The sense of being observed deepened: something or someone wanted to be noticed. Nothing felt familiar. [loc. 334]

Cadi lives in a Welsh village with her mother Violet and her aunt Lili. In the village, in August, it rains every day. In the village, nobody will tell Cadi about her dead father or her dead sister. ('Who knew whether or not Lilwen Hopkins, daughter of a witch woman, hadn’t bound their mouths with threads of silence?') But her sister's coming to haunt her, owls and flowers, and Cadi can't stay away from the lake at the end of the lane.

This is a claustrophobic and sometimes unnerving tale of the bonds, and the grievances, between the three women. Violet is still mourning her lost daughter Dora (who her husband Teilo insisted on naming Blodeuwedd) and won't talk to Cadi about any of it. Lili, Teilo's sister, has 'an eye for the girls' and tends to side with Cadi against Violet. And Cadi, who's fourteen, is caught in the middle of it all, feathers and leaves on her bedroom floor, the choking scent of meadowsweet, and a stranger named Owen Penry who's come to the village and set the gossips' tongues wagging.

This novel has something of the atmosphere of Garner's The Owl Service, though it's a much gentler book, and the protagonists are all female. Indeed, there are few male characters in Ghostbird: Violet the widow who doesn't remember her father; Lili the woman who will never marry but perhaps has a hope, by the end, of love; Cadi, who grew up fatherless and doesn't seem to have any male friends, though she is very close to her schoolmate Cerys. The village is shaped by women: the gossips, and the rainmaker, whose vengeance against 'naysayers' was to make it rain every day in August. And there is the ghost of a small girl, who 'has stopped wanting to eat chocolate and forgotten what pasta tastes like. Instead, she hunts mice until dawn.' I'd have liked more about the rainmaker, who was a shadowy presence at the edges of the novel, but that vague presence adds to the atmosphere: often eerie, sometimes magical, seldom explained. Ghostbird is dreamy and hypnotic, and I found myself falling easily into its rhythms and language: I'll look out for more of Lovekin's fiction.

Fulfils the ‘Title beginning with G’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.