This isn’t exactly a mystery but it does have plenty of crime. Jennie Godfrey creates a 12 year old character as memorable (and perhaps more rooted in reality) than Flavia DeLuce. Miv, the heroine of the story, lives in 1970’s Yorkshire, with her Dad, her Aunty Jean, and her mother, who doesn’t speak and spends most of her time in her room. Miv is pretty much left to her own devices but is happy enough hanging out with her best friend, Sharon.
Margaret Thatcher has just been elected and the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper is in full swing. While Miv and Sharon are someone insulated from the stories about the Ripper, the news coverage is beginning to grow, and it is becoming unavoidable not to know about him. The boys at her school even play a game called “Ripper chase.”
As the author herself grew up in Yorkshire, and her father actually knew the Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, the details in this book are extremely specific and really create an intense and memorable setting for this story of a 12 year old who is trying to figure out where she fits in the world. While the Ripper is out there, childhood in the 70’s was a different deal, and children were left on their own, told to come in before dark. Miv and Sharon can get up to whatever they might want to.
What Miv decides is that if she herself can catch the Ripper, their family won’t have to move. One of the reasons cited by her Dad for a possible move is the danger of the Ripper. So, she and Sharon begin to make lists of suspicious things, focusing on different people, neighbors and teachers. In their tight community everyone knows one another, everyone goes to church together, and most of the adults work in the same places.
Miv encounters many things in this book: adultery, alcoholism, pedophilia, domestic abuse and racism. The racism piece is the most front and center. Everyone shops at the local market owned by Omar, a widowed Pakistani, who lives there with his son Ishtiaq. The three become friends – Miv, Sharon, and Ishtiaq, and the girls are witness to the taunts of the skinheads (or the “shaved men” as Omar thinks of them) and the pretty constant ominous threat of violence.
Godfrey creates incredibly vivid characters. Omar was perhaps my favorite, but there’s also a bullying teacher; a drunken vicar; a librarian with odd bruises who the girls have a kind of crush on; a lonely old man, and many more, including, of course, Miv herself, whose attempts to figure out the complexities and terrors of the adult world are very believably those of a 12 year old. Her friendship with Sharon is also a character in itself, as 12 turns to 13, and make up, boys, and all that accompanies puberty begins to affect their friendship.
The lists Miv makes are obviously not going to catch the Ripper, but her lists of different people who have “suspicious” things happening to or around them make Miv look closer at them. She solves these little mysteries. She figures out the bullying teacher has gotten divorced; that the sweet librarian is being beaten by her husband; that Omar misses his wife and is trying as hard as he can to keep Ishtiaq safe.
If you lived through the 70’s at all, this book will take you right back there, but the setting itself is so specific, this is Miv’s experience, not a mirror of your own. The poverty of Miv’s family and of their neighbors is accepted by all of them. They make do. They help each other through traumas and joys. Despite the hardship of their lives, there’s a real community in this slice of Yorkshire, which makes the Ripper killings almost worse.
While this sounds quite grim – and many things in this book are grim – it’s the tenacity, bravery and smarts Miv exhibits that make this book a standout. She is not an unbelievable heroine, she’s a real 12 year old, with a 12 year old’s somewhat skewed – or lack of – perspective. There are some heartbreaking tragedies in this book which the author deftly weaves into the life of the story, and despite the tragedies there is also some optimism and hope. This is a book that will definitely stay with me for quite awhile, as will Miv. — Robin Agnew