Van has finished reading… The Mahogany Pod by Jill Hopper

There are times when you’re reading fiction – when it’s really good fiction – that you forget it’s fiction. It doesn’t matter what the genre is, there’s a strange sense of delight as all these possibilities unfold and you start to wonder, and perhaps even hope you know where the story is going to go. Characters you root for will get their due, and those you hate will get theirs too. Come the last page almost everything will be neat and tidy, though one or two questions may continue to tantalise, and a sense of satisfaction will abound. Jill Hopper’s The Mahogany Pod is the first memoir I’ve read where I had to keep reminding myself that this isn’t fiction, that there is no plot, that these are things that really did happen.

If Jill Hopper’s The Mahogany Pod were a novel it would be a quiet one. Astutely titled to pique your expectation of that last page, keenly structured to keep you glued to the plot and invested in the timelines, and finely written to open up all the sense and emotion of the journey you’re about to go on. And perhaps there’s a good object lesson for the novelist in Jill Hopper’s approach to the people involved in the events she recounts. There are no layers of description, or starkly drawn idiosyncrasies to bog the reader down, no heavy character building to make each person more visible or understandable. Instead there are people interacting and reacting, saying and doing things in that consistent way people do so we build that opinion of them naturally.

At heart this is a very personal story, as you would expect. It is unequivocally brutal at times, and also beautiful. It’s uplifting in a way, too, and I think that’s down to the personalities involved. It’s what we feel, I think, that imprints more strongly than what we say or see or do. And what we feel is never the same as what other people feel, even when the words we choose to express that are the same.

The Mahogany Pod was published by Saraband in February 2021 ISBN:9781912235933

You can find Jill on Twitter @JillHopper1

My thanks to Bex at #IndieBookNetwork for allowing me to review this book