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The bad box
Book by Fell, Alison
167 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1987
About the author
Alison Fell
29 books4 followersAlison Fell is a Scottish poet and novelist who lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
June 3, 2025
My mother passed this on to me after a bout of decluttering. She was at school with Alison Fell, and about half the book is set in a Borders town much like the one they grew up in; it was odd to recognise events that are clearly based on incidents from their schooldays that I had previously heard from her.
It's a portrayal of the inner pressures on a group of girls reaching adolescence in the late 1950s, and - at least based on my mother's accounts - I suspect it is far more accurate in its portrayal of that era than Mantel's book below. Spirituality is not discussed overtly, but it is definitely present as an undertone, heard most clearly in the recurring rumours of a white hind around the Highland village which provides the setting for the other half of the book and in the mythlike story the main character daydreams for herself as she struggles to process what she is feeling. Fell reproduces the tone of recorded Scottish legends very accurately in these passages. I thought the Highland sections captured the feel of the remoter parts of Scotland quite evocatively, but found it harder to recognise in the Border setting the kind of town my mother describes growing up in; she clearly has more positive memories of it than Fell does.
It's a portrayal of the inner pressures on a group of girls reaching adolescence in the late 1950s, and - at least based on my mother's accounts - I suspect it is far more accurate in its portrayal of that era than Mantel's book below. Spirituality is not discussed overtly, but it is definitely present as an undertone, heard most clearly in the recurring rumours of a white hind around the Highland village which provides the setting for the other half of the book and in the mythlike story the main character daydreams for herself as she struggles to process what she is feeling. Fell reproduces the tone of recorded Scottish legends very accurately in these passages. I thought the Highland sections captured the feel of the remoter parts of Scotland quite evocatively, but found it harder to recognise in the Border setting the kind of town my mother describes growing up in; she clearly has more positive memories of it than Fell does.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review