Reviews of The Earth Hums in B Flat from Australia and New Zealand

The Earth Hums in B Flat was published in Australia by Text Publishing in April 2009


Cheryl Jorgensen's review in the Courier Mail said:
In this book, set in a small Welsh town in the 1950s, the dreams and innermost thoughts of young, innocent but precocious Gwenni Morgan, 12-year-old savant, take the reader on a moving journey.
Gwenni can fly in her sleep, she is a passionate reader and she has a strong bond with Catrin and Angharad, the children of schoolteacher Mrs Evans, who is aware of her pupil's intellectual gifts and tries to foster them, despite Gwenni's mother's smalltown mistrust of her.
Mrs Morgan is often irritated by Gwenni and forbids her borrowing books from the schoolteacher or talking about her exhilarating night-time excursions or, indeed, anything that will attract the town's attention to her. For Gwenni's mother has a dangerous secret eating at her, which, although many people in the town could probably guess at it, is only fully revealed to her family when the schoolteacher's abusive husband goes missing.
A fan of the detective novel, Gwenni decides to solve the mystery of Mr Evans' disappearance to help her beloved teacher and her children, but inadvertently uncovers too much information to ever allow her own family to exist as it has in the past.
This is a touching story about the interrelationships of people in communities and especially troubled families. It is about redemption and the unquestioning love children offer their parents – however errant or neglectful these elders may be.
(Courier Mail, 3 April 2009)


In the Herald on Sunday Nicky Pellegrino wrote:
Dark family secrets are at the core of this bewitching debut novel set in a small village in 1950s Wales. It’s the story of Gwenni Morgan an odd girl caught up in her fantasy life. In her sleep Gwenni flies around her neighbourhood and during the day she sees faces in the rough distemper on the walls and imagines the Toby jugs up on the shelf are alive. She even hears the earth sing.
But Gwenni’s mother Magda is fearful of these little eccentricities, squashing any sign of them, concerned that people might find her daughter strange. And then a local man Ifan Evans is murdered and Magda slides into strangeness herself, swallowing pills and battling her nerves. Detective-story obsessed Gwenni doesn’t help matters, becoming fascinated by the mystery of the murdered Ifan as well as her own family’s badly kept secrets, with dramatic consequences for all.
Since the story is told entirely by Gwenni, we see everything from her naïve and imaginative point of view and,just as she does, have to guess at what the grown-ups aren’t telling. The reader, of course, knows a lot more about the dark sides of life, we are much more suspicious and untrusting. But Strachan does a masterful job of allowing us to experience the world as innocently as Gwenni does.
This is a story about a time and a girl on the brink of change and Strachan tells it with a fey sort of charm as well as a sense of foreboding. She brings the period alive with light use of detail, such as descriptions of the terrible food Gwenni is forced to eat, the faggots, the gravy covered in rippling skin, the gristly lamb and pellets of mince that look like rabbit droppings.
Then there’s the all-pervading influence of Chapel, the small-town gossip and petty hatreds, the shifting friendships and the stigma of mental illness. And the secrets, of course, that every family has as Gwenni’s grandmother tells her. “Big secrets, small secrets, silly secrets, bad things we want to hide”.
There’s a lot going on in this novel but it’s a complicated story simply told. Strachan manages to convey a real sense of a small Welsh community without clogging the story with endless idiom, or even more daunting, Welsh language. Although it deals with the dark themes of depression and madness, The Earth Hums in B Flat is often comic largely thanks to Gwenni’s offbeat interpretation of all that goes on around her. This is a memorable read.
(New Zealand, Herald on Sunday, April 2009. Also on Beattie's Blog)


In The Australian, bookseller and writer Jennifer Levasseur's review said:
We like to think of children as lumps of clay, primed to mould. Or as vessels, waiting to be filled with the stuff of books, as essayist Anne Fadiman writes in Rereadings. She prefers to imagine books as the containers into which children pour themselves, "changing their shape to fit each vessel".
This image seems an apt one to hold in mind while exploring Mari Strachan's impressive debut novel, The Earth Hums in B Flat.
Gwenni Morgan, the unsophisticated but imaginative child narrator, finds herself at odds with the world and her small 1950s Welsh village, and she's considered odd. She can fly in her sleep, she tries to befriend (and educate) the local policeman by giving him detective stories and she sees the toby jugs straining to listen to family secrets. She's 13 ("12 1/2", she corrects her mother, clutching every last moment of her childhood) and in limbo, trusting books to explain the universe and the people with whom she's forced to share it.
When the deacon, Ifan Evans, goes missing, Gwenni knows she has to become involved. The policeman's more interested in his garden and the townspeople only whisper about Evans's roving eye and rumoured violence. But if he doesn't turn up, who will provide for Mrs Evans and the two little girls? Gwenni already imagines them starving or dying, like Beth in Little Women.
While she's no Harriet the Spy, Gwenni knocks on doors, thrusting a photo of Ifan Evans she "borrowed" from the family's home, Brwyn Coch. She doesn't realise that she knows more about the case than almost anyone else: she arrived at Brwyn Coch that morning to care for the children, only to find shattered dishes and the girls explaining that their father had the black dog.
In deceptively simple prose and with grace and humour, Strachan explores the lies and secrets of a small town. What begins as a strange and seemingly quaint story of a delusional girl who refuses to grow up becomes a multifaceted and page-turning thriller that grapples with murder, deception, insanity, grief, judgment and forgiveness. The Earth Hums in B Flat can be scarfed greedily in a single sitting but its nuances deserve more leisurely attention. ,br>Gwenni's story brings to mind recent novels such as The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, What Was Lost and When Will There be Good News?, but while Gwenni thinks of herself as a detective, she's drawn in only because the adults do such an inept job.
Her motives are simple; she wants to spare those she cares about from unhappiness. While a voracious reader, she's not precocious or erudite. Her friends don stockings and giggle at boys, but she looks for Alice's rabbit hole with the Evans children. Seeing how the adults live, it's no wonder she becomes a kind of Peter Pan, flying away in the night.
As much as she tries to bind them, her mind and body betray her. She must enter the ugly, grounded world of adults. She avoids this as long as she can, misunderstanding events around her,but also refusing to question things too seriously. She wants to know and not to know at the same time, walking the cold fields in a confused suspense.
Her father is loving in a clumsy, conciliatory way. Her mother, always nervous and fretting, fears what others think about her relatives, particularly Gwenni and her oddities. Her older sister Bethan hangs a Buddy Holly poster on their wall and shocks their mother at the dinner table by asking about contraception. Beneath their day-to-day world, their foundations crack.
At the start of the novel, Gwenni's most pressing concerns (after re-learning how to fly) extend to maintaining control of her side of the bed and convincing her best friend, Alwenna, to read Anne of Green Gables so she can understand how they're kindred spirits. Before long, though, she's forced to confront much more serious questions of life and death.
This is not a children's story but it does bring the reader back to childhood, to the big and small mysteries of life and the frustration of understanding more and less than the grown-ups; of discovering things for the first time, of not understanding your place, of being thwarted by adults and of making mistakes they could have helped you avoid. Gwenni feels too much, too deeply, and understands too little. But she knows enough to want to fly away.
Light and gentle even for the most distracted reader, The Earth Hums in B Flat combines beautiful, pitch-perfect everyday detail with quick action and subtle but moving symbolism. There are few false steps in this cosy, satisfying read, and none too large to ignore. This is a novel for adults to pour themselves into, to remember and reinvent the joys and pains of being a child and of growing up to the truth without abandoning the necessity of imagination.
(The Australian, 18 April 2009)



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