I wish Peter's Room were more available, because there are so many people I would recommend it to if it were. The series doesn't sound like much when you describe it - they're books for children/young adults, half set at boarding school and the other half at home (home being a largeish farm/estate that their father unexpectedly inherits in book three and that they're still settling into by Peter's Room). But Forest is brilliant at characterization and atmosphere and just uses that basic school-and-home YA framework to do whatever the fuck she wants, and there's a particular stretch of three or four books in the middle where she's at the height of her powers and the effect is extraordinary.
To give a quick snippet of her writing I'm going to copy out all of "All the Birds of the Air...", the very short chapter where the main character finds that her beloved hawk has died in the night. The book, though it takes place over just a few weeks, is very episodic: lots of set-pieces and vignettes and chapters that could be self-contained short stories. This chapter is slipped in between two much longer ones, and Sprog is never mentioned again.
So it had happened at last.Last summer, the very morning she'd met Patrick and Jael for the first time, her father, talking of hawks in general, had said: They can be perfectly well when you leave them at night and next morning you'll find them stone dead. As her eyes took in the feathered shape, dangling inertly from its jesses, that had been The Sprog, Nicola knew that deep in her mind she'd remembered that sentence each time she opened the hawkhouse door and each time been reprieved. Till today. Patrick had said you couldn't keep merlins through the winter.
As if that somehow made it partly his fault she thought hatingly that it was a good thing he wasn't here to see how right he'd been. Lawrie, on the other hand, had been wrong: crying didn't have to burst out, even though when animals died it was always misery past bearing: one would always much rather it were one of the family. Crying inside was another matter altogether; but at least people couldn't look at you sideways and ask, madly tactfully, what was up, had you got a cold?
And presently, when everything was tidied away and Sprog buried, she found herself trudging back over the snow-covered down to home and breakfast--not that she wanted either, but she supposed there'd be a terrible huha if she just didn't turn up; and an enormous scarlet moon was ballooning down the dark western sky and that was something she wouldn't see again; from now on she'd be able to stay in bed like other people.
Instantly, at the unguarded thought, tears flooded her eyes and furiously she blinked them dry. If she was going to behave like this every time she thought of him, it was going to be simply ghastly. In a way it would have been better if it had happened at school; it was so much more difficult to cry there. But already Trennels had come into view, a pattern of lighted windows against the dark morning, and she stood still, deliberately thinking Sprog until the name was just a bruised sadness--so if she could manage it so that she didn't tell anyone till tonight, better still tomorrow, she ought to be all right--
A sentence wrote itself across her mind: Our poor little cat is dead. Emily is sorry. She thought it again as she went on towards the house, and the clenched, wrung feeling inside her began to slacken. She couldn't have said why Emily Bronte's long-ago sorrow should have been comforting, but it was probably that Charlotte had told her it was wrong to care too much about animals, just like Ann always said it to her, Nicola, too.
― Lily Dale, Thursday, 22 February 2024 04:19 (one month ago) link