Beautifully written, brilliant follow up to Donovan's first novel "Buddha Da."
As in the first novel, both are written in Glaswegian vernacular which I really enjoyed.
The book is told through Fiona's perspective. Her working class family lives in council housing in inner city Glasgow. She is a bright student, and gets moved up to do her A levels. In college, she meets Jas, her first love.
The story is about Fiona's family, her hard life, the choices she makes, and of course, its outcome.
Looking forward to more by Donovan! ( )

A beautifully written book about a girl, Fiona, growing up in a tenement in Glasgow. She is bright, and despite her impoverished background (or maybe because of it), she achieves academic success, firstly in attaining highers, and then in obtaining a place at Art School.

She harbours a love of all things Emily Bronte, which helps her cope with the ups and downs and tragedies she and her family travel through. It also helps to have read Wuthering Heights and a bit about Emily, to appreciate some of the allusions and references in this story.

This took me a while to become attached to it, mainly due to the fact that it was written in the first person narrative (by Fiona), and in Glaswegian vernacular throughout (which I initially found annoying). However, with persistence, I found Fiona and her family (her father and her three siblings) engaging and sympathetic. The Glaswegian vernacular added to the gentle humour of the book.

The conclusion is neat, but not trite, and I welcomed it, although some readers may find it slightly too convenient. ( )

The initial doubts I had about being able to read something written in Scots disappeared after the first couple of chapters and I found this surprisingly readable. Fiona is a sympathetic character and her story exerts a strong narrative pull.

Full review at:
http://lizzysiddal.wordpress.com/2008... ( )

Fiona O'Connell is a Glaswegian teenager, living in a tenement flat with her Catholic family, reading Emily Bronte while she washes the dishes and dreaming (initially) of becoming a poet. Bracketed with a prologue and epilogue set four years apart from it, the central narrative follows Fiona through her late teenage years as she copes with a series of tragic family events.

I say "copes" - but what I found most strange about this novel was Fiona's emotional distance from the tragedies she lives through. While revealed to the reader in hints and clues, climactic events and pivotal moments are often not fully acknowledged by Fiona herself for many pages. If she acknowledges emotion, she counters it by asserting her control over it: "A great pain welled up inside me, though nae tears broke ma frost." Even the pain of others appears to Fiona somehow controlled, contained, moulded: her twin sisters' eventual collapse into weeping at a family Christmas seems to her "like some classical sculpture of grief." Many of the events of the novel demonstrate Fiona's attempts to impose order and structure on her life. Her religion is significant: after the pivotal event in the novel, everything gets "intae a guddle" as the family's church attendance lapses, and Fiona's anxiety about the mechanics of confession is a recurring theme even when her behaviour would suggest she had left her religious beliefs far behind.

The title of Anne Donovan's novel sets up certain expectations of the way the narrative will play out - but as Stevie Smith suggested in her review for the Guardian, it might have been more accurate to entitle it 'Not Being Emily' (oh, how I wish I'd put it that neatly first!). Although Emily Bronte serves as both the inspirational spark for Fiona's interest in arts and culture, and a key subject in her later work as an artist, 'Being Emily' moves far beyond the templates of the life of Emily Bronte and of her most celebrated work. Fiona, although she identifies with Emily - and shares significant values with her - isn't trying to emulate her. When she visits the National Portrait Gallery and looks at the portrait of Emily painted by her brother Branwell, she is able to recognise the romantic artifice, the lack of true likeness to the writer she feels she knows.

The shade of 'Wuthering Heights' hovers over the book, invoked in the exploration of family tragedy and the narrator's language. A significant decision Fiona makes about her relationship to her brother Patric(k) is explicitly compared to a plotline in 'Wuthering Heights'. More importantly, Anne Donovan has Fiona 'speak' in a Glaswegian dialect (albeit a not especially thick one), recalling the dialect passges in 'Wuthering Heights'. It's a shame that the near-simultaneous publication of James Kelman's 'Kieron Smith, Boy' has stolen Donovan's thunder and seen this novel less widely reviewed (UK critics being generally too exercised by the attempt to comprehend the dialect of a working-class Protestant Glaswegian teenage boy to be much concerned with a working-class Catholic Glaswegian teenage girl). The lanugage is readable, musical, and important in defining who Fiona is; Donovan engineers a couple of scenes with former schoolfriends of Fiona who rarely use dialect words, once again throwing into relief Fiona's own home background, and emphasising the choices she is making for her own life.

(Incidentally, there's a great article by John Mullan on dialect in the Guardian Book Club on Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting: http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/...)

It's a pity that Donovan felt it necessary to tie up the ends of the tale quite so neatly. Some of the angry energy of Fiona's final show, and her family and friends' reactions to it, is dissipated in the (mostly) happy ending. But Fiona's strong sense of place and family is central to her identification with Emily Bronte. She chooses to stay at home for her university studies, and seems mildly surprised that anyone would think it made sense to go elsewhere. Ultimately her love for her home is what finally 'breaks her frost': "The love that had been put intae it had made it hame, Mammy'd made it hame, and since she'd been gone it wasnae hame any mair. And it never would be again." As her career as an artist begins to bear fruit, she starts to acknowledge in her work how important her upbringing is rather than rejecting it; the climactic installation in the novel sees her take ownership of the climactic moment of her life and turn it into something creative.

This is not blow-you-away classic, but it's definitely a cut above the average. Beautifully written, characterised and structured, this is a thoughtfully crafted coming-of-age story about the search for female identity and the power of art. ( )

BEING EMILY BY ANNE DONOVAN
ISBN: 978 1 84767 044 1
312 Pages

Synopsis from the back of the book

Things are never dull in the O’Connell family. Still, Fiona, squeezed between her quiet brother and her mischievous line-dancing twin sisters, thinks life in their tenement flat is far less interesting than Emily Bronte’s.
But tragedy is not confined to Victorian novels. And life for Fiona in this happy domestic set-up is about to change forever. Following the devastating events of a single day, her family can never be the same. But – perhaps- new relationships will develop, built on a solid foundation of love.
Moving, funny and ultimately heart-warming, Being Emily is a wonderful novel about one young girl trying to find her place in the world amid the turmoil that only your own family can create.

My view

Written in the Scottish dialect, this is quite difficult to get into but after the first couple of pages the writing starts to flow and it gives the book a much more familiar feel. Although the book seems centred around one particular event, I feel the story generates outwards in many directions. It deals with many issues in its progression, none of them overtly, and is very subtle with the conclusions.
The main character, Fiona, is as likeable as you can get. The many trials and tribulations she experiences throughout the book can be mirrored the world over. We can all sympathise with at least one of her problems if not more, and it’s a genuine understanding of what she is experiencing, that makes her come to life.
An easy to read story about the harsh realities of the real world, as witnessed through the eyes of a down to earth student from Glasgow. ( )