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Julie Hearn: "Ivy" |
Ivy is in danger...
... she just doesn't know it yet.
Ivy has been spotted in a rough part of London by Oscar Aretino Frosdick, a rich Pre-Raphaelite painter. He needs a muse and Ivy is perfect - a stunner. Realising quickly that Oscar has more money than sense, Ivy's greedy cousins order her to sit for him - and to do anything else he might ask. But their 'nice little earner' has sinister consequences.
Oscar's jealous mother is determined to get rid of her son's beautiful model..
Oscar's famous neighbour wants her all to himself...
And Ivy's strange and troubled past is about to catch up with her...
Ivy is yet another spellbinding turn from Julie Hearn.
Bookseller
Julie Hearn's splendid chapter headings bring to mind those of Candide. Where Voltaire titillated us with "What befell Candide among the Bulgarians" Hearn offers "In which Ivy is treated rather badly by philanthropists in ridiculous dresses". But what really reminds me of the Voltaire classic is the nature of the protagonist - naïve and accidental. Ivy is a heroine who trips and swoons her way through her life, passed from person to person like hand-me-downs. Things happen to Ivy. Ivy does not happen to things.
[...] Set in the London of the Pre-Raphaelites, Ivy's world is wonderfully re-created, subtly replete with period details of Lambeth, Vauxhall, Battersea and Chelsea. We are shown both the louche charms of the painters' world and the rotten underclass of the slums. Here are robbers, conmen and swindlers as well as laughable aesthetes, fashion victims and opium addicts. Attempting to blot out the memories of a painful period of her childhood, Ivy herself makes free use of laudanum, one reason why she seems unable to focus long enough to get herself out of the clutches of other people's greed and lust.
The episode Ivy is trying so hard to forget, when she was used as a decoy by "skinners" - a gang of muggers who strip their victims' clothes to sell at market - introduces us to some of the book's best characters, all absolutely foul and yet still somehow loveable. Here we meet the alarming Carroty Kate, a woman with secrets of her own, and her murderous accomplice "Fing" Nolan.
Ivy herself drifts, or is sometimes pushed, from scene to scene, Candide-style, though at least no-one tries to tell her that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds". If anything, the reverse is true in Ivy, a seething, dark-edged, amoral snake of a novel, so that when Ivy finally, finally rouses herself, takes her destiny into her own hands, and makes good her escape, we can but stand and cheer with a loud "Hurrah!"
The Guardian
Ivy romps through the trials and tribulations of a poor girl in Victorian London with Dickensian ebullience [...] Hearn writes with impish humour and her characters are vivid grotesques, but her modern-day final chapter makes a serious point about the status and fate of these artists' models in contrast to the famous men who painted them.
The Observer
Julie Hearn writes a unique style of historical novel: her research is obviously painstaking but the resultant stories, marinaded in detail that flavours rather than overwhelms, bring the period to life without any sense that the reader is being educated.
The Telegraph
Julie Hearn's Ivy is a splendidly fruity story about a 19th-century slum child later taken up by a Pre-Raphaelite artist enchanted by her luxuriant red hair. Ivy is a dreamy girl, whose vulnerability is exploited by all those she comes into contact with. As such, she offers a welcome change from those fictional Cockney urchins who become more chirpy the worse things get for them, and the author deserves congratulations for her honesty as well as her artistry.
Rich in period detail, this is excellent historical writing, often grimly funny and with a teasing ending.
The Independent