{"id":6816,"date":"2025-12-02T04:44:20","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T12:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=6816"},"modified":"2025-12-02T04:44:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T12:44:20","slug":"jennie-godfrey-the-list-of-suspicious-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/jennie-godfrey-the-list-of-suspicious-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennie Godfrey: The List of Suspicious Things"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This isn\u2019t exactly a mystery but it does have plenty of crime.\u00a0 Jennie Godfrey creates a 12 year old character as memorable (and perhaps more rooted in reality) than Flavia DeLuce.\u00a0 Miv, the heroine of the story, lives in 1970\u2019s Yorkshire, with her Dad, her Aunty Jean, and her mother, who doesn\u2019t speak and spends most of her time in her room.\u00a0 Miv is pretty much left to her own devices but is happy enough hanging out with her best friend, Sharon.<\/p>\n

Margaret Thatcher has just been elected and the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper<\/a> is in full swing.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The boys at her school even play a game called \u201cRipper chase.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 While the Ripper is out there, childhood in the 70\u2019s was a different deal, and children were left on their own, told to come in before dark.\u00a0 Miv and Sharon can get up to whatever they might want to.<\/p>\n

What Miv decides is that if she herself can catch the Ripper, their family won\u2019t have to move. One of the reasons cited by her Dad for a possible move is the danger of the Ripper.\u00a0 So, she and Sharon begin to make lists of suspicious things, focusing on different people, neighbors and teachers.\u00a0 In their tight community everyone knows one another, everyone goes to church together, and most of the adults work in the same places.<\/p>\n

Miv encounters many things in this book: adultery, alcoholism, pedophilia, domestic abuse and racism.\u00a0 The racism piece is the most front and center.\u00a0 Everyone shops at the local market owned by Omar, a widowed Pakistani, who lives there with his son Ishtiaq.\u00a0 The three become friends \u2013 Miv, Sharon, and Ishtiaq, and the girls are witness to the taunts of the skinheads (or the \u201cshaved men\u201d as Omar thinks of them) and the pretty constant ominous threat of violence.<\/p>\n

Godfrey creates incredibly vivid characters.\u00a0 Omar was perhaps my favorite, but there\u2019s 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The lists Miv makes are obviously not going to catch the Ripper, but her lists of different people who have \u201csuspicious\u201d things happening to or around them make Miv look closer at them.\u00a0 She solves these little mysteries.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

If you lived through the 70\u2019s at all, this book will take you right back there, but the setting itself is so specific, this is Miv\u2019s experience, not a mirror of your own.\u00a0 The poverty of Miv\u2019s family and of their neighbors is accepted by all of them.\u00a0 They make do.\u00a0 They help each other through traumas and joys.\u00a0 Despite the hardship of their lives, there\u2019s a real community in this slice of Yorkshire, which makes the Ripper killings almost worse.<\/p>\n

While this sounds quite grim \u2013 and many things in this book are grim \u2013 it\u2019s the tenacity, bravery and smarts Miv exhibits that make this book a standout.\u00a0 She is not an unbelievable heroine, she\u2019s a real 12 year old, with a 12 year old\u2019s somewhat skewed \u2013 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. —\u00a0Robin Agnew<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This isn\u2019t exactly a mystery but it does have plenty of crime.\u00a0 Jennie Godfrey creates a 12 year old character as memorable (and perhaps more rooted in reality) than Flavia DeLuce.\u00a0 Miv, the heroine of the story, lives in 1970\u2019s Yorkshire, with her Dad, her Aunty Jean, and her mother, who doesn\u2019t speak and spends … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2355,1276,2294,2356,2359,2357,2358],"class_list":["post-6816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-jennie-godfrey","tag-robin-agnew","tag-sourcebooks","tag-the-list-of-suspicious-things","tag-thoughtful-read","tag-yorkshire-1970s","tag-yorkshire-ripper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6818,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6816\/revisions\/6818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}