4.5 stars.

The writing is beautiful. I found myself rereading many passages because I wanted to see or feel what is described again. The writing is lyrical with amazingly visual descriptions of this rural area in the woods in the north of England. There's such a sense of place and I always hesitate to call a book atmospheric not wanting to overuse the term, but it is the best description I can come up. Yet, if I didn't know I was reading a novel taking place in northern England, I would have thought it was a novel of the south, of the American south. It's a slow burning narrative building up to the inevitable dark and violence of revengeful confrontation.

Fourteen year old Daniel and his fifteen year old sister Cathy have been taken by their father John to live in this remote wooded area after Cathy is bullied and after their grandmother who cared for them passes away. Their elusive, almost mysterious mother seems to come in and out of their lives until their grandmother tells them one day that she won't be back. I never felt quite satisfied with not really knowing the mother's story, although later in the novel we get hints. Their father is a brute of a man, using his body to make a living fighting or working for evil men helping them to "settle" things. But now he builds a house for his children and tries to protect them from the outside world. What is clear is that John loves Daniel who is a gentle soul who keeps house and cooks and Cathy, the tomboy who hunts and is more like her father. They lead this isolated life, except for studying with their neighbor Vivian until the reprehensible Mr. Price, the legitimate landowner ( not the children's mother) shows up. So the story moves on another level, not just this individual family but the unfairness, the greed and awful treatment of workers and tenants by Price and others and things get complicated.

I would have given this five stars if it weren't for the end scenes which felt a little over the top. However, I was so impressed with this debut novel which was nominated for the 2017 Booker Prize. Fiona Mozley covers a lot of ground - family love and loyalty, moral questions over fairness and greed and how justice is realized . I will be very interested in what she writes next.

I received an advanced copy of this book from Algonquin Books through NetGalley.

What a wonderful and complex story. I couldn’t put it down and am still thinking about this book several days later.

Elmet tells the story of a poor family living in rural Yorkshire on land owned by a local landlord. The story moves very slowly, which may admittedly be a problem for some. However, I was spellbound.

Our narrator is Daniel, a 14 year old effeminate boy who looks up to his 15 year old sister, Cathy, who is a tomboy that takes after their father, John. John is a giant of a man who once worked as an enforcer and a bare-handed fighter, but has decided to leave that behind and live off the grid with his family.

The main conflict of the story is that the landowner, Price, tries to evict Daniel and his family and this leads to set of escalating conflicts and situations. [The final act and the lead-up to the fire was a teeny bit overdone, but nevertheless it left me heartbroken. (And, Cathy's description of how she would be able to get through anything by going to her mind's eye and her anger and her fears about becoming another misused and murdered young woman...sigh.)

Bits that made me smile: Daniel’s desire take care of his family/home, Cathy’s love of the outdoors and her abandonment of her studies to run outside, John’s attempts (e.g., the tree of lights in the copse) to create his own safe little world for Daniel and Cathy.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel until the very end, which seemed like an ending written more the big screen (which very well may happen) than what I expected (my fault) for the novel. I actually liked that I didn't realize the narrator was a male until quite awhile into the novel, not that the gender actually mattered. The novel centers around a brother, sister, and father living off the land, until he builds them a home, and the father is a bit of a hero for being a prize fighter. The fifteen-year-old sister has considerably more physical strength than her fourteen-year-old brother, who comes across as being more effeminate, and seems to have more characteristics of the mother the readers don't really get to know. But, the ending. I keep wondering if there could have been another way to wrap up this novel which showed us so much about how the father organizes the locals to fight the landlord, who is also the employer, by holding back their rent and demanding more pay, and how the town rouses together at a symbolic bonfire, everyone feeling more hopeful and proud. Then, on the night of the big fight, everything changes dramatically, and the novel comes to a rather abrupt end, which left me feeling a bit shortchanged.

This came across at first as a father trying to raise his children on the fringe of society and through unconventional ways but morphs into something other. Makes me wish I knew more about Elmet, the last Celtic kingdom in England.
Daniel is the self described effeminate and cowardly teen whose eyes we see the story through. His older sister Cathy is scrappy and strong willed in a world that has no tolerance for these traits and his father "Daddy" aka John is an occasional agitator, frequent bare knuckle legendary boxer, and often an enforcer for others in exchange for favors. They are living on Mr. Price's land as squatters after Cathy gets into some trouble after school one day. Mr. Price is your stereotypical bad news land lord to much of the surrounding area. As the story develops we are lead to a dramatic conclusion that I should have seen coming but didn't.
Overall there were moments of brilliance in this debut novel that was Booker prize short listed, my favorite being the natural language the author used as a descriptive force at times. I was looking forward to this one and was not disappointed. Thank you to the publishers for providing me with this arc available through netgalley. I look forward to its American release and future works by this bright new talent.

I really wasn’t sure what to expect when I began reading Elmet, and to be completely honest, after devouring this novel in two days my immediate reaction was, “What on Earth did I just read?”

I can’t give you, nor would I want to, a plot summary that would make sense and do this novel justice. As mentioned, I’m still trying to make sense of what I just read. But I can tell you how this book made me feel.

I fell in love with Danny, Cathy, and their father, John. In many ways, the closeness of this rebel family just trying to stake a place to exist in a society that simply wasn’t built for people like them reminded me of Jeanette Wall’s family in her memoir, The Glass Castle. There were many times where I pictured John and Rex Walls sipping on whiskey and discussing the absurdity of needing a piece of paper to prove that a piece of land belongs to you or talking about the demons that troubled them both.

The character of Cathy, the eldest sibling and lone female in the family, is one that leaves a mark on you as a reader. She understands through experience that growing into a woman comes with great risks and that she has a choice on how she chooses to manage that risk. She can either rely on her father, a brute of a man, to be her rescuer, or she can rely on herself. In a very poignant scene, Cathy says to her brother:

“Daddy won’t always be around. And even if he is, it is my life and my body and I can’t stand the thought of going out into the world and being terrified by it all, all o’ the time.”

Cathy is a million if not billion different women from around the globe who live with this reality that exists beyond the fictional pages of a novel. And she is certainly not the first woman to come to this realization as a young girl. I want to know more women like Cathy, and be more like her too. Even though I ultimately wish there wasn’t a need to be this strong.

And that leaves us with our narrator, Danny. Danny is a boy who was born into exactly the right family. Throughout the novel, Danny is referred to as a “funny” and “pretty” boy. He prefers the indoors to the woods that he calls home. He would rather engage in discussion than hunt or fish. He takes pride in making good meals for his family. He even admits that he never once has thought of himself as being a boy. He’s just Danny. And that is how his family sees him. I appreciated the way Mozley developed this part of Danny’s character because it was done with great care and authenticity.

As a reader, I found myself truly rooting for John, Cathy, and Danny. They are a mismatched family as one could ever imagine, but they belong to each other. They remind us that the job of a family is to provide shelter when the storm of society is too great to bear alone. Elmet is an old soul and is a book that will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.

Special thanks to Algonquin Books and NetGalley for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Daniel and Cathy live with their father, John, in a house he build himself, surviving on whatever they can hunt, grow or forage. When the local landlord, Mr. Price tells John that he and his family are trespassing on Price’s land, things go very badly very quickly. Tired of working long hours for a pittance, it doesn’t take John long to stir local workers into a frenzy and threaten violence and a strike. It’s not long before Price comes to John with a proposal – he will give the land to Daniel – if John calls off the strike. This book has taken the literary world by storm, and for good reason. Calling on the stories of tenant farmers forced out of their homes by ruthless landowners and even a little of the Robin Hood legend, this story is striking in its simplicity, violence and revenge