Losing Hope by Nikki Dee.

                                Losing Hope by Nikki Dee.

"You always want to make out everything is clean and nice, and everybody is good inside and the world's a happy place. It's a crock."


What a tangled web of deceit, distrust and malice as we weave and wend our way aimlessly through life living on the brink of disaster, losing hope. Nikki Dee presents us with a readable  but hardly plausible portrayal of extremes: self-righteousness contrasted with nihilism? A child abduction is tragic but can make excellent reading or viewing. Take for instance, the recent tv drama The Missing on BBC1 starring James Nesbitt as Tony Hughes and Frances O'Connor as Emily Hughes. The plot is intricate and sustained, the characters are thoroughly intriguing and realistic with the suspense building up momentum. Brilliant. My kind of excellent drama.

With Losing Hope we have a clever pun on hope/Hope. It is 2011 and the drama begins well with the burning of a building in Portsmouth and the discovery of a murdered man and a pregnant and under-nourished young girl. The police believe that the girl has shot the man and set the building alight and are on the point of arresting her and charging her with murder.
As they start to unravel, painstakingly, the strands of the many different stories, Chrissie Chambers, a social worker is called in to interview the terrified girl who turns out to be Hope Gidson, the girl who was abducted when she was 5 years of age. This is when we learn of her abuse, physical as well as sexual. It doesn't take long to work out the culprits particularly when the characters are introduced at the beginning.

A touch of loose morals, a teenage pregnancy and not knowing who the father is and that's our introduction to Mel, a girl who was abandoned and brought up in a children's home. She is attracted to wealth and wants what everyone wants-a nice home, a good fellow, children, the works. but, plenty of money for comfort! "I believe a happy family is the most important thing a person can have." Agreed. "You know what it's like to have no-one of your own, no one who loves you. Now I'll have someone who will always love me." As we all know it's probably the main reason why these abandoned children end up getting pregnant as teenagers. When her husband-to-be is involved in a fatal accident Mel is fickle enough to agree to marry his friend, Clive once Hope is born.

Plan A is to approach potential father no 1 about the pregnancy, guilt-tripping him into marrying her. The father is aggressive and threatens that if she makes further contact he will call the police. Weird! Plan B is to approach the latest boyfriend and see what he has to offer. He is a mug and falls for it, promising the earth but disaster strikes. She has built up a bit of a bad reputation as a slut but compared to Linda Edwards, a nurse who has provided her sister Deb and friend Steve, the odd ball with so much love and stability that she has a mid-life crisis at 30 and starts sleeping around with a different man on a weekly basis in order to get pregnant then marries the odd ball!

Plenty of gossip, weddings, deaths, funerals and christenings which dominate the plot with trivialities.
Missed opportunities. A pity. This could have been much improved and less of a boy meets girl episode.

Publisher: Word Play.       ISBN: 978-480065734.

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

Copyright 2014. Permission must be obtained before any of this article review is reproduced.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Stranger From Lagos by Cyprian Ekwensi

Image
  image courtesy of Google images   Ekwensi was born in Nigeria in 1921. He wrote about the country and people of Nigeria-city life and life in the rural areas. Loko Towns and Other Stories was published in 1966. A Stranger From Lagos was one of the nine stories in that collection.   The writer explores the place of women in society. Lilian is trapped by social conventions. Her fiance treats her like a possession as if he owns her. It is written in third person to allow the writer's thoughts to merge with Lilian's. The protagonist is unable to speak to the stranger in public although it is obvious that there is a strong physical attraction between the two. If Lilian asserts herself she will go against social conventions (for females) and her reputation will be damaged through rife and unhealthy gossip. She will therefore be stigmatised as a loose woman. The story explores her inner conflicts in accepting these "conventions" or flaunting them as well a
Read more

A Stranger From Lagos by Cyprian Ekwensi Final Part

Image
                                                                    courtesy of Google images Lilian uses her sexuality to liberate as well as attract the opposite sex. Ekwensi uses "wiggled." Lilian had just had her hair done and was wearing very large, loop earrings. This had been done for her lover's benefit. She was conscious of all the eyes watching the two of them. The writer uses the simile: she felt like something projected on a 3D screen for all Onitsha to view. We are told very little about the stranger other than that he was tall and good-looking. We are told he didn't feel embarrassed by all of the attention. He would ruin her reputation and he was well aware of this: he would scandalize her and then she would be left to the gossips. You get the sense that this has probably happened before. The dialogue here is disjointed. Mystery surrounds him but his desire to see Lilian is compelling: "I have wanted to see you" and he refers to his
Read more

A Bit of Singing and Dancing by Susan Hill

Image
Here you'll find 11 varied but intense stories about emotional struggles of ordinary people trying to get to grips with life. For some unfortunates, the adjustment is too great and tragedy is inevitable, something very characteristic of Hill's writing as many of you will already know. A Bit of Singing and Dancing is less dramatic and not quite so tragic. I can stay out here just as long as I like, I can do anything I choose, anything at all, for now I am answerable only to myself. Esme is still coming to terms with her mother's death and her new-found freedom. She is over 50 years of age and has reluctantly been forced into caring for her forthright and domineering bedridden mother for 11 years prior to her death. She had been half-alive satisfying her mother's needs and repressing her own needs and desires. Her mother's death had given her a new lease of life, an unexpected freedom which also attracted fear and bewilderment to someone who had been so sheltered
Read more