After I Capture the Castle, which was, darlings, frankly a complete disahster, what do I do but pick up another novel narrated mostly by a teenage girl. However, this one was a turtle of a different complexion. Indeed, it was rather wonderful. 
 So, here we have a novel about miserable scummy British (in this case Scottish) underclass lives which can be viewed in many British movies such as Neds, Broken, A Way of Life, Ladybird Ladybird, Nil by Mouth and so forth. I mostly enjoy this kind of movie in the same way I used to enjoy Leonard Cohen albums. You end up vibrating mildly from utter horror. 
 The recipe for this novel was : slice half a pound of The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan (in which the kids bury their parents and live alone in the house); add in several pints of a wonderful Japanese movie called Nobody Knows* (where the abandoned kids manage to avoid detection by the authorities for months) and grate over the top a generous helping of the Voice of Baba, the foulmouthed hilarious best-friend in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls novels. 
 Then serve up the resulting dish in one to three page sections spoken by sisters Nelly and Marnie and neighbour Lennie, somewhat like the interviews-to-camera in Modern Family (Cameron, Haley and Alex), only with rotting corpses and dealing jellies instead of adopted Vietnamese babies and dude ranch holidays. Since The Cement Garden, Nobody Knows, The Country Girls and Modern Family are four of my favourite things (way ahead of schnitzel with noodles) this novel was good to go. 
 And it went, like a rocket. Read in one day. Great stuff. 
 Honesty bids me confess that I did cavil slightly at two aspects: 
 1)	Is it credible that a 15 year old girl and a 12 year old girl could in the depths of a Scottish winter dig a grave for a man's body in the garden? Hmmm? Wouldn't the ground be rock hard? Last time I tried to bury a man in my back garden in winter I gave up after three hours of fruitless hacking and confessed to the police. 
 2)	The younger sister talks in an insanely posh/affected/antiquated manner which is entertaining but deeply silly. E.g. : 
 He was a very pleasant lad and strangely familiar to me, not that I got a chance to quiz the fellow for he ran off and with the greatest of haste to fetch some milk, which was rather a pointless feat given we hadn't even been offered a cup of tea. 
 Contrast that with sister Marnie describing a painful first meeting with her boyfriend's rich liberal parents: 
 The tension in the room is well tasty unlike the green tea they're serving in the tiny wee teapot with matching egg cups. They're dying for me to ask about it so they can babble about their halcyon days living in Tibet. Five minutes in the room and these people are seriously giving me the dry boke. 
 Oh Marnie, you crack me up. 
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