Evocative ... There is a dense richness to “Pearl” — in the novel’s many robust themes (motherhood, postpartum depression, loss, grief and art) and in its gorgeous imagery, some (the river, the garden) inspired by the medieval poem ... A masterful novel, shot through with legend and song.
[Pearl] is wonderful on the detail of a late 20th-century rural English childhood and at its best recalls Edna O’Brien’s masterful A Pagan Place ... Like many pearls, though, the novel has imperfections. The decision to situate the narrator who is telling the story some decades after its key events happened, without introducing any real accompanying narrative in the present day, robs the book of momentum ... Marianne’s narratorial voice also feels occasionally undercooked.
A slow-burning meditation on grief and memory ... Hughes harps a little too often on the familiar theme of the unreliability of memory, and occasionally the writing is a bit flat. But for most of this short novel, the prose carries a real charge, and Marianne’s voice is so convincing that you come to feel that you’re not just reading a story but bearing witness to real suffering – and redemption.
Hughes, who is a poet herself, brings an attention to language and to the natural world that lends a beautiful vibrancy to her sentences and images. But there’s a droll sensibility here, too: Humor brightens grief-filled and difficult moments, such as an episode of postpartum psychosis ... Hughes has written a tender debut novel which, at its end, brings the reader back around to the grown Marianne at the Wakes, imbuing the festival with a lovely, redemptive new meaning.
