Astonishing splashes of colour

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Kitty Wellington, the narrator of Clare Morrall's absorbing sure-footed first novel, has been brought up in a large family by her painter father. Surrounded by older brothers, she has no real recollection of either her mother, who was killed in a car crash, or her sister, who ran away from home.

The great strength of the novel is Kitty herself. Morrall has provided her with a compelling narrative voice - wry, confiding, perceptive. Echoes from JM Barrie's disturbing masterpiece are quietly sounded, with particular emphasis on missing mothers and "lost boys".

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Astonishing Splashes of Colour Chapter One The Flash of My Skirt At 3:15 every weekday afternoon, I become anonymous in a crowd of parents and child-minders congregating outside the school gates. To me, waiting for children to come out of school is a quintessential act of motherhood. I see the mums -- and the occasional dads -- as yellow people. Yellow as the sun, a daffodil, the submarine. But why do we teach children to paint the sun yellow? It's a deception. The sun is white-hot, brilliant, impossible to see with the naked eye, so why do we confuse brightness with yellow? The people outside the school gates are yellow because of their optimism. There's a picture in my mind of morning in a kitchen, the sun shining past yellow gingham curtains on to a wooden table, where the children sit and eat breakfast. Their arms are firm and round, their hair still tangled from sleep. They eat Coco Pops, drink milk and ask for chocolate biscuits in their lunchboxes. It's the morning of their lives, and their mums are reliving that morning with them. After six weeks of waiting, I'm beginning to recognize individuals, to separate them from the all-embracing yellow mass. They smile with recognition when I arrive now and nearly include me in their conversations. I don't say anything, but I like to listen. A few days ago, I was later than usual and only managed to reach the school gates as the children were already coming out. I dashed in, nearly fell over someone's pushchair, and collided with another girl. I've seen her before: an au pair, who picks up a boy and a girl. "Sorry," I said, several times, to everyone. The girl straightened up and smiled. "Is all right," she said. I smiled back. "I am Hélène," she said awkwardly. "What is your name?" "Kitty," I said eventually, because I couldn't think of a suitable alternative. Now when we meet, we speak to each other. " 'ello, Kitty," she says. "Hello, Hélène," I say. "Is a lovely day." "Yes, it's very warm." "I forgot to put washing out." "Oh dear." Our conversations are distinctly limited -- short sentences with one subject, one verb. Nothing sensational, nothing important. I like the pointlessness of it all. The feeling that you are skimming the surface only, whizzing along on water skis, not thinking about what might happen if you take a wrong turning away from the boat. I like this simple belief, the sense of going on indefinitely, without ever falling off. "Where do you come from?" I ask Hélène one day. I'm no good with accents. "France." "Oh," I say, "France." I have only been to France once, when I was sixteen, on a school trip. I was sick both ways on the ferry, once on some steps, so everybody who came down afterwards slipped on it. I felt responsible, but there was nothing I could do to stop people using the stairs. Another mother is standing close to us with a toddler in a pushchair. The boy is wearing a yellow and black striped hat with a pompom on it, and his little fat cheeks are a brilliant red. He is holding a packet of Wotsits and trying to cram them into his mouth as quickly as possible. His head bobs up and down, so that he looks like a bumble bee about to take off. "Jeremy, darling," says his mother, "finish eating one before starting on the next." He contemplates her instructions for five seconds and then continues to stuff them in at the same rate as before. She turns to Hélène. "What part of France?" Hélène looks pleased to be asked. "Brittany." James would know it. He used to go to France every summer. Holidays with his parents. One of Hélène's children comes out of school, wearing an unzipped red anorak and a rucksack on his back in the shape of a very green alligator. The alligator's scaly feet reach round him from the back and its grinning row of teeth open and shut from behind as he walks. " 'ello, Toby," says Hélène. "Have we got Smarties today?" he demands in a clear, firm tone. He talks to Hélène with a slight arrogance. Hélène produces a packet of chocolate buttons. "But I don't like them. I only like Smarties." "Good," she says and puts the buttons back in her bag. He hesitates. "OK then," he says with a sigh, wandering off to chat to his friends with the buttons in his pocket. His straight blond hair flops over his eyes. If he were mine, I'd have taken him to a barber ages ago. Hélène turns to me. "We walk home together? You know my way?" "No. I live in the opposite direction to you." "Then you come with me to park for a little while? Children play on swings?" She is obviously lonely. It must be so hard to come to Birmingham from the French countryside. How does she understand the accent, or find out the bus fares and have the right change ready? "I have to get back," I say. "My husband will be expecting me." She smiles and pretends not to mind. I watch her walk miserably away with her two children and wish I could help her, although I know I can't. She chose the wrong person. The yellow is changing. I can feel it becoming overripe -- the sharp smell of dying daffodils, the sting and taste of vomit. When I walk home, I remember being met from school by my brothers, twenty-five years ago. It was never my father -- too busy, too many socks to wash, too many shirts to iron. I never knew which brother it would be. Adrian, Jake and Martin, the twins, or Paul. I was always so pleased to see them. Paul, the youngest, was ten years older than me, and it made me feel special to be met by a teenage brother, a nearly-man. None of them looked alike, but my memory produces a composite brother ... Astonishing Splashes of Colour . Copyright © by Clare Morrall. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Having lost her mother as a child and then her own child to miscarriage, Kitty clings desperately to her sanity. A Booker Prize finalist, this debut novel takes its title from Peter Pan's Neverland. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Like Booker-winner Monica Ali, British newcomer and Booker finalist Morrall creates an alienated yet immensely appealing heroine. But unlike Ali's protagonist, Kitty Wellington is at home in Britain's culture; it's her spectacularly dysfunctional family and a personal tragedy that bring her grief. Dangerously unstable after a miscarriage and her resulting inability to conceive again, Kitty sees other people and her environment in auras of color. A device brilliantly effective at times, this serves to establish Kitty's febrile, fantastical imagination. For three years, Kitty has lived in a flat next door to her loving, ineffectual husband, whose own problems (a limp; an obsession with order; a fear of unfamiliar places) render him similarly incapable of dealing with the world. But Morrall gradually reveals the real cause of Kitty's anguish: her lack of identity. Brought up helter-skelter by her irascible, eccentric artist father and four older brothers, Kitty has no memory of her mother, who died when she was three. Even in her most depressed moments, however, Kitty has wit and intelligence, even as her childlike impulsiveness and failure to foresee the consequences of her acts lead her to initiate a double kidnapping. Morrall artfully reveals the true story of Kitty's family in a suspenseful plot that unfolds like layers of an onion, meanwhile providing a convincing portrait of a woman striving for emotional survival. Agent, Laura Longrigg. (Oct. 1) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Taking its title from a description of Neverland in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Morrall has created an ethereal novel of loss and redemption that is both heartbreaking and beautiful. While Kitty grew up with four much older brothers and an eccentric father, cared for by all five, she never stops asking questions about the mother she can't remember. Each brother answers differently and her father avoids the subject. When she miscarries her own child and cannot have another, her search for her mother intensifies, becoming confused with a search to replace her lost child. As the story is told through Kitty's engagingly intimate voice, the reader is compelled to follow her wanderings, searches, and flights. Characters are brilliantly drawn, the pacing is perfect, and the tone is never maudlin. A finalist for the Man Booker Prize, this is a novel to be savored. --Elizabeth Dickie Copyright 2004 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

The travails of a severely depressed young woman after the death of her baby. See Kitty outside the school gates. Parents are picking up kids. Everything is yellow: for Kitty, yellow equals happiness. (Morrall leans hard on color imagery.) Now see Kitty sneak into the school. We realize her "yellow period" is more like mood indigo, for Kitty has no business here and has to beat a hasty retreat. Three years earlier, her womb had ruptured while she was pregnant with her first child, and she's still in shock. "The world is made for children," she thinks, "and without them you're no one." The 32-year-old Kitty and her husband James live in adjacent apartments in Birmingham, England. The odd arrangement satisfies Kitty's need to grieve alone, though it disturbs James, who is loving but tight-lipped, unable to discuss their trauma. So child-husband and child-wife tiptoe around each other--though it's the novel's most important relationship and should have gotten more attention. But it competes for the spotlight with Kitty's family across town: Her father Guy, a mildly bohemian artist, and a whole clump of older brothers, sisters-in-law and nieces. Kitty was raised by her father. Her mother died in a car accident when she was three and Kitty has an aching need to know more about her, but Guy and the brothers won't talk. Then, surprise! Two dramatic revelations about her past devastate Kitty further and cause her to cross the line into a twilight world of delusions and lawlessness. She steals a baby from the hospital, then dumps it in favor of Megan, a runaway and pyromaniac. The two take an unhappy trip to the seaside before Kitty remembers to call home. A deadly fire at the end leaves Kitty essentially unchanged. Morrall's first, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker, handles the exploration of loss better than it does the rattle of family skeletons, but it's still a drab, one-note affair. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.