I plucked Michael Marshall Smith’s 2009 novel The Servants off my TBR shelf — where it has been languishing for a long time no doubt– and was rewarded with a lovely, quiet tale about eleven-year-old Mark who has moved to Brighton with his brand-new step-dad, David, and his mom, who appears to be quite ill. The book reminded me of The Book of Lost Things and A Monster Calls , both five star reads for me.

Mark is wholly unhappy about his new circumstances. Although he’d been to Brighton before, back when his parents were still married, then it had been on holiday where his days had been filled with fun activities. It’s winter now, and cold, and he spends his days trying to learn how to ride his new skateboard down by the beach. He doesn’t like David, “who liked to explain everything” in a weird accent because he had spent so much time living in America. Mark also feels that David has some sort of weird control over his mother and was always “hovering in the background doing whatever it was he always did.”

One day, Mark meets the old lady who lives in the basement apartment.

…she was not so much old as very old, and also a little scary-looking. When she blinked, she looked like a bird, the kind you saw on the seafront, stealing bits of other people’s toast

When she invites him for tea and cake, she shows him an astonishing piece of the house’s history, hidden behind a locked door in her apartment. This is the servants’ quarters and, as it turns out, it is haunted.

The Servants is very much a coming-of-age story. It is about Mark trying to navigate his new world, a world where there is never enough diet Coke in the fridge, and where his understanding of the way life works is skewed by his immaturity therefore elevating his father to a position he clearly does not deserve and casting David in the role of evil step dad.

There was one tiny conversation between David and Mark that reduced me to tears and the metaphor of the servants as the beating heart of a home, who have to work together for anything to be accomplished, was apt.

This one is a heartfelt winner.

Although T. Greenwood is a prolific writer, Such a Pretty Girl is the first of her books I have read. It’s one of those books where nothing happens–I mean this is a book driven by character, not plot–and yet it is absolutely riveting.

When the novel opens, Ryan Flannigan is counting down the last few days before her daughter, Sasha, heads to the West coast to start college. Ryan’s childhood bestie, Gilly, keeps sending her urgent texts before finally just sending her a link to a story from the Times. Ryan is shocked to discover that the story is about her mother, Fiona, from whom Ryan is mostly estranged. Worse, the story is about the discovery of a very personal photo of Ryan when she was just a girl that was found in the possession of Zev Brenner, a billionaire who has been charged with sex trafficking and pedophilia a la Jeffrey Epstein. This news is followed by even more shocking news and Gilly begs Ryan to come back to New York City.

Such a Pretty Girl bounces between the 1970s and present day 2019. As a child, Ryan lived with her mother, Fiona, in Lost River, Vermont, home to the Lost River Playhouse where Fiona was an aspiring actress. Lost River was meant to be a “summer respite for actors who worked in the city and a place for aspiring actors to apprentice themselves.” Fiona had been there since 1965 and she and Ryan lived there full time. Gilly and his family also live at Lost River, but only in the summer. Gilly’s father is a working actor and his mother an artist in New York.

Fiona decides to leave Lost River and go into the city to give acting a more serious try, but in the end it is Ryan, who is just ten, who is discovered–first as a model and then as an actress. This strains the relationship between mother and daughter. The time the novel spends in NYC

After Gilly gives Ryan the news about the discovery of the photograph, he begs Ryan to come back to Westbeth, an apartment building populated by dancers and actors and artists and, famously, Jackie O. It’s a real place, actually. It’s worth reading about its interesting history and it is definitely a character in Greenwood’s book. So, in the present day Ryan and her daughter head back to the city and to the place that she, for a very important time in her life at least, called home. There are matters to attend to, and ghosts to exorcise.

This book is very evocative of a time and place and as someone who loves New York and grew up in the 1970s, I found that very compelling. I also loved Ryan’s recollection of her childhood, the perspective skewed through the lens of adulthood. When she recalls her first major ad campaign (for Love’s Baby Soft, a mainstay of every teenage girl in the 1970s) she says

I am wearing fake eyelashes, pink rouge on my cheeks, and lip gloss so thick and shiny you can almost see your reflection in my pout. I am holding a pale pink stuffed bunny. But you can’t tell if I am a child made up to look like an adult, or an adult made to look like a child. When I found the ad years later, it felt like someone had punched me in my throat.

And if you are wondering where Ryan’s mother was in all this, yeah, that’s kind of the point.

This is a terrific, well-written book. Highly recommended.