Lyrics for the Loved Ones - Anne Goodwin

 I guess it’s the mark of a good writer when a reader feels some kind of emotional attachment to a created character. I read Matilda Windsor Is Coming Home and fell in love with the character of Matty. I felt outraged at all she’d endured and I wanted desperately for everything to turn out ‘okay’ for her. I wrote about that book on this blog a couple of years ago. Here’s the link. 

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

Briefly the book looks at the life of one woman incarcerated from early adulthood in a psychiatric institution for fifty years. Unjustly. 

I then read a delightful novella, Stolen Summers, which tells of Matty at Ghyllside asylum.

https://bookphace.blogspot.com/2022/10/stolen-summers-anne-goodwin.html

Lyrics for the Loved Ones completes Matty’s story. Because of the wider issues covered in this book I think it can be appreciated if you haven’t read the previous stories about Matty but the best experience would be to read them all in sequence.

Lyrics for the Loved Ones sees Matty on the cusp of her hundredth birthday. That in itself is a joyous concept after all she’s been through, all she’s endured. She’s now in a care home in Cumbria. Covid is just around the corner which together with #BlackLivesMatter disturbs Matty’s equilibrium. But where Matty Windsor Is Coming Home told of Henry, Matty’s brother and Janice a care worker this third book goes further. 

The chapters with their regional headings - West Cumbria, Bristol and Somerset offer us a dual narrative with different characters and their diverse tentacles ultimately lead in some way back to Matty. But these characters have their own stories and their challenges to deal with making this very much a multi layered fiction. Some of these issues are challenging and in the wrong hands could render a story dark and unforgiving. But Anne Goodwin has the knack of striking that balance between injecting an element of lightheartedness into the narrative without diffusing the gravity of the situations. Neither does any one thrust swamp another. It’s well judged. It’s thoughtful work that enables us to react to some of the world’s craziness and immorality alongside the characters in the book. Some are situations we can all identify with, especially lockdown, others were events we must have witnessed in the news, for example: Windrush, George Floyd, but reading this book they are given palpable impact. I’ve avoided divulging too much of the plot but something I loved was seeing Matty embrace modern technology! YouTube, Zoom and tablets!  Central to the book is a consideration of the complexities and nuances of human relationships. How people are driven, how they behave, and react to others and themselves. Matty is the cement that binds it all together. Happy 100th birthday, Matty. ❤️

My thanks to the author for gifting me an inscribed copy.