Stolen Summers - Anne Goodwin

 

If you were captivated by Matty (and her penchant for jelly babies) in Mathilda Windsor is Coming Home then you will enjoy this prequel which tells of Matty’s admission to Ghyllside hospital in 1939. I say ‘enjoy’ but I think you will experience a wider range of emotions than that. For this book tells us of the real Matty Windsor, the girl, the woman she was before she was incarcerated for fifty years. And why was she incarcerated?  Because she had a baby ‘out of wedlock’. It wouldn’t happen today, one hopes. But that doesn’t really excuse or diminish the sense of anger and horror of Matty’s treatment. This is a fiction, yes, but it’s based on fact. Facts of a cold, cruel regime that sees the real Matty Windsor hidden deep inside her poor electro shocked head.

In Stolen Summers we are witness to Matty’s arrival and early days in the asylum, we weep at her confusion, and her concerns for her six year old brother and we rage at the inhumanity of a step father who can do this to a young girl. The story enjoys a dual time line, 1939, and showing how the relaxing of asylum rules, twenty five years after the beginning of her ‘stay’, in 1964 allow the sprinklings of the real Matty to emerge from the chrysalis of her custody into the swinging sixties world outside of Ghyllside.

And we are allowed to get to know Matty. We know that she is warm, funny, caring, lively, yet in possession of an integrity that makes her situation all the harder to understand. And never does the love she has for her brother wane. We are introduced to some new characters, the dynamic Doris and the enigmatic Eustace, Characterisations richly drawn from Anne Goodwin’s pen just as Henry and Janice were in ‘….Coming Home’ and we are allowed to get to know Matty through the crisp and well paced narrative of the author invoking the idiosyncrasies of the ages she is describing so palpably, the war years and the sixties.

You don’t need to have read the first book to appreciate this one but I’m betting you’ll want to read it straightaway after you finish this! And if you’ve read the first book than you’ll be eager to read this one. I reviewed it on my blog last year. Here’s the link if you’re interested.

https://bookphace.blogspot.com/2021/05/matilda-windsor-is-coming-home-anne.html

My thanks to the author for a gifted, signed copy. 

Published 1st October. Available on Amazon.co.uk