THE COLOUR OF MILK, a delight of a short novel about a horror of a short life

THE COLOUR OF MILK
NELL LEYSHON
Ecco (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Mary is a sharp-tongued farm girl, and she will do anything to learn to read and write. But as she does so through four seasons of one extraordinary year, she discovers that nothing comes for free. Told by a narrator whose urgent, unforgettable voice will break your heart, The Colour of Milk is an astonishing novel.

I CHECKED THIS EBOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THEY NEED US TO USE THEIR SERVICES!

ALL SPOILERS...ALL THE TIME...SPOILERS BELOW! THE PHOBIC ARE WARNED OFF!

My Review: First, read this:

this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand.

in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things. i can see birds and they fill the sky with their cries. i can see the trees and i can see the leaves.

and each leaf has veins which run down it.

and the bark of each tree has cracks.

i am not very tall and my hair is the colour of milk.

my name is mary and i have learned to spell it. m. a. r. y. that is how you letter it.

I am utterly besotted with this book. My bookish friend Katie is the one who gets the blame, I mean credit!, for convincing me to try the read. It is short, and it has something I can't describe to you adequately that rings me like a bell. I think, I guess, it's a sense of the passionate urgency Mary feels in learning her letters...like that act, that piece of knowledge, will transform her, will make everything Different. If nothing else, it will give her a leg up on her noxious sister Beatrice.

Her life, Mary's, is about what you expect a woman's life to be at that time and in that class. It is nasty, brutish, and turns out to be short. It is simple, and it is without ornament. It is, in short, a titanic waste of the brain of a clever woman like Mary. As her story begins, she is sold by her father to the local vicar as a caretaking maid-of-all-work for the vicar's housekeeper. His wife is terminally ill, and there's no one whose job it is...no child, no sibling...to muck in and do the labor of cleaning the invalid, her bedding, keeping her as entertained as possible; the housekeeper needs the extra hands. The vicar? Men did not (and do not, by and large) do that sort of work.

Mary's waspish, direct honesty isn't easy. Not for her...it leads those around her to anger, more often than not...and not for the world she lives in. Making honest observations about the facts of life is not a fast way to make squads of pals. Mary's sisters don't much like her, her mother can't be arsed to care about much that isn't making her husband the drunken shit as happy as possible, and Mary's grandfather (her father's father) is crippled by an accident so despite his pleasure in her company he isn't much help to Mary in navigating the world.

What happens as Mary assumes her duties in the vicar's household is the oldest story in the world. She's raped. She isn't, however, going to put up with that, and that's what makes this story a five-star read for me. Mary serves up her revenge and takes her punishment with her eyes open, her chin up, and her heart unburdened by regret.

I fell in love with Mary from page one. If you read the above quote, which is from the beginning of the book, and do not feel the appeal, are not vibrating with the language's power, then skip the read. It won't get better...the story's really simple, it's unsurprising, and it's only half the point. The other half is the storytelling, the sense of being there with Mary. We're hearing a voice that shouldn't have reached us from a person who didn't matter when she was alive so she wouldn't have been allowed to leave a record after her death.

It's such a simple tale. It's such an oft-told tale. It's a beauty, because it's got something extra, a little trick up its sleeve, that thing that makes a story taller in the saddle. The risk is how many people will be put off by it. They will find it a gimmick, but I found the storytelling an enhancement of an otherwise unremarkable story a young woman writing about her unhappy, unjust, and in the end short life of work, abuse, work, abuse, rape, punishment; it's lifted to its next, finer level. It's about Mary's indomitable will, her absolute uncompromising need for More. I resonate to that story. The other, I don't.

And that's why I love it, instead of merely thinking it was an interesting, not always successful, stylistic experiment. (How does Mary know how to spell some of the complicated words she uses, eg "hierarchy"?) The effort to bring an unpolished and unmediated voice to life is doomed to artificiality, of course, since this is fiction and not a research project. But the mannerisms were successful in breathing life into a character whose essential reality overcame, for this testy old reader, the inevitable awareness of the story as construct, as artifact.

So I'll shout my thanks westward to my friend in New Jersey...the same one who warbled me into reading The Mercy Seat!...whose recommendation of the story was sufficiently enthusiastic as to make my read necessary. Thank goodness my library had an ebook available. I would've been much the poorer for not having Mary along for the ride into the rest of my reading life.

A story, a character, a book like this is a treasure. Get it, if you can.