The story – based on a medieval poem – of a young woman in a small English village struggling with the disappearance of her mother, what feels like a lifetime ago.
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.
