The Blurb: Fern’s choices in life and in love are an echo of her mother’s, as Iris’ are an echo of her own mother’s. Three women, three generations: one dark secret. Iris keeps a scrapbook of Lawrence, the lover who went missing years earlier. Fern’s father. She defines herself by his loss and soothes herself with gin and the fairytale of this one perfect relationship…Fern, once a ‘strange and difficult child’ who believed that her dead grandmother’s soul lived inside her stomach, reluctantly returns home to the island to take care of Iris. She is tasked with finding Lawrence and in the process she has to confront her own past and memories…Ivy, Iris’ mother, had her own cache of secrets; spells she took to the grave. Spells that Fern unearths. The Scrapbook is a novel about memory, and the unreliability of memory. It’s about the tangled, often dysfunctional, bonds of family. And it’s about absence and the power that a void can exert over a person’s life.
The Review: Fern’s life plans have come to nothing and she has returned to the small island she vowed to leave forever to look after her mother, an alcoholic who’s spent most of her adult life pining for the married man who could never be hers. There is a third presence in the house; that of Fern’s late grandmother Ivy, an enigmatic woman of enchantment and secrets.
If all this sounds a tad melancholy, that’s because it is. But Carly Holmes’ The Scrapbook is beautiful in its melancholia. A novelist Holmes may be, but within lies the soul of poet.
On the small island where she lives, accessible only by ferry, Fern is discovering that perhaps all was not as it seemed as a child. Her grandmother’s Cooking Book for one. Instead of recipes it lists spells. And perhaps Fern is closer in character to her mother than she dares to concede.
In these exquisite pages, the story of three generations of women unfolds like a flower. In other words, beautifully and delicately. So seductive is the author’s prose that we barely notice as we are wafted nimbly back and fore through time, via multiple perspectives, without ever losing touch with the narrative thread. It all just washes over us.
Like Holmes’ follow up novel, Crow Face, Doll Face, The Scrapbook is about what happens when the mundanity of everyday life receives a light dusting of the fantastical. Also, like its follow up, it’s a rich and rewarding read; mesmeric and beguiling, immersive and evocative. Once picked up it’s near impossible to put down. I urge you to let it cast its spell on you as it did me.
The Author: Carly Holmes lives and writes in a small village on the banks of the river Teifi in west Wales. Her debut novel, The Scrapbook, was shortlisted for the International Rubery Book Award, and her Literary Strange debut short story collection, Figurehead, was published by Tartarus Press in limited-edition hardback, to critical acclaim. Her award-winning stories have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Ambit, The Ghastling, and Uncertainties, and have twice appeared in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Yearanthology series.
Crow Face, Doll Face, her second novel, is an uncanny, brooding tale of domestic disturbances, dysfunctional families, flawed mothers, and unfulfilled dreams.
The Scrapbook by Carly Holmes was published by Parthian in 2014 and is available now.
RICHARD E. ROCK 
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