Sometimes you pick up a book because it is talked about a lot, or promoted well, or you hear it on the grapevine, read a review, your bookclub selects it, a friend recommends it. And sometimes, just sometimes, the gods smile on you as you browse a library shelf and you alight on a little gem which you have never heard of, the author’s name rings no bells, you know nothing about it and you have absolutely no reason for picking it up out of all the hundreds and thousands of books around you. Bone Meal for Roses is just one such. The easiest way to describe it, is to tell you it is a luminous read.
It begins with a scared little girl, Poppy, whose mother is completely enslaved to drugs and seems to have spent all her adult life thus, and therefore the childhood she gives her daughter is a terrifying one, of insecurity, hunger, deprivation, risk. Yolande is not physically abusive, but her neglect definitely is. Poppy is far too young to fend for herself at 6 years old, and she lives surrounded by the menace of other drug addicts around her mother. Then out of the blue, the traumatised little girl is rescued by her grandfather and grandmother.
Sherry’s novel is set in South Africa, and is full of the descriptions of its landscape. Some of the most magical are those of the Jem and Anneke’s farm, Poppy’s Grandpa and Ouma:
Jem and Anneke spent two years converting the stables into a long, L-shaped house that showed only a blank, solid wall to anyone approaching from the road, but which opened all along its hidden length on top the sun-filled courtyard on the far side. Flanked by a raw-rocky hill and an old barn set at right angles to the stable, the courtyard was utterly private.
There they hollowed out a pond and created drainage rills to manage the swampiness from the underground spring, piled on layers and layers of well-rotted manure and compost, planted a lemon tree, an olive and two kinds of plum. At one end, they planted flowering quince, to grow into a hedge along the bottom of the hill that divided their land from the le Roux’s. They created a small grove of silver birches which flourished ion the sheltered space, protected from the unforgiving African sun and the buffeting winds. They built a set of raised beds for vegetables in one corner, and filled the test of the space with a multitude of seeds, that, over the years, have grown into a lush wonderland of flowers, fruit and herbs.
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Poppy is taken to live on this magical fairy-land farm, and thrives under their love and care. There is such tenderness and warmth in all the relationships amongst Jem, Anneke and Poppy that this part of the story is just so beautiful to read. Poppy renames herself, Sam, leaving behind her hated past. As Sam grows up however, regretfully, even in fairy land, things cannot stay the same, and sad changes have to happen. Also, Sam is growing into a teenager, and changing, and she is at once stronger and more vulnerable than ever.
On the neighbouring farm, some new residents arrive, and one of them is an artist who makes wooden furniture, and who mesmerises Sam. Sherry saves some of her loveliest descriptions for that relationship between material and artist:
What was merely a pile of logs and plants the evening before has transformed into something needing and sentient overnight: a moody lover. Sometimes it’s all blissful curving openness that greets him, and the waiting wood is smooth-limbed and spice-scented. Those are the days when Charlie becomes every knot, grain and notch of it, But on the wilful days, the workshop smells musty when he pulls open the doors, and a claggy grime of dust and resin seems to cling to every surface
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“The finished pieces that now stand on the far end pf the barn have a life to them that seems to go beyond the warm tones of the finely sanded, painstakingly polished wood. As the sunlight strengthens into midday, and bands of gold slide through the open double doors and pool around Charlie as he works, the completed pieces in the shadows seem to glow in response, as if they’re still nourishing themselves on his fervent energy.
As he closes up the barn each night, he touches each item as he passes, his brief caress somehow refining the curves even further.
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Sam does not register the wedding band on Charlie’s hand, and plunges headlong into her new-found feelings, confused and conflated with other events in her life at that time. It would not do to give away the storyline and spoil the read for anyone, but suffice to say it is a most satisfying read from beginning to end, magical all the way, and Sam is simply unforgettable, as are Jem and Anneke.
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