His cellphone is the only concession to modern technology, but it's an ancient kind that needs to be reloaded with credit every once in a while, and he only has it so that employers can call him.

Their cottage doesn't have a phone or a television or a computer, although it does have a sizeable garden that Jeanie and Dot spent their years tending to, while Julius picked up odd jobs. Jeanie and Julius, these fully-grown adults living with their mother, are clearly considered odd in the village. Why are they still living at home? Why did they never leave? These are the first questions readers will likely have, and over the course of the book, they will discover a multitude of answers, some of which are hinted at in the opening pages alongside secrets that Dot has taken with her to her grave. These twins, Jeanie and Julius, have lived all their lives in this cottage on the outskirts of the village, Inkbourne, with their mother. It settles on the plants and bare soil in the front garden and forms a perfect mound on top of the rotten gatepost, as though shaped from the inside of a teacup.' Such gorgeous, specific descriptions abound throughout the book.īook Reviews 'Bitter Orange' Keeps The Tension Simmeringĭot, a 70-year-old woman, dies in the first chapter, and the rest of the novel is concerned with her twin children who are 51. It's late April in an English village and unseasonal snow is falling on a cottage: 'It falls on the thatch, concealing the moss and the mouse damage, smoothing out the undulations, filling in the hollows and slips, melting where it touches the bricks of the chimney. The opening pages of the novel are chock full of glorious descriptive language. Children's books often redeem them with some lesson about how outsiders are just like everyone else, despite their strange appearances or ramshackle houses or mysterious actions.īut how often, in our stories, are oddballs allowed to remain exactly who they are? How often do they take center stage as main characters and reorient our view of what is 'normal'? How often are such characters given rich, complex, and interior lives, complete with sorrows, talents, opinions, and flaws? Claire Fuller's new novel, Unsettled Ground, does just that. Fairy tales sometimes cast them as witches, or as beautiful young royals cursed to live as beasts.

Every small town (and every neighborhood in every city) has its oddballs, the people who live on the fringes, a little out of step with everyone else.

Claire fuller unsettled ground