Publisher's Weekly Review
In this piercingly beautiful, fiercely lyrical first novel, narrator Alison Freemantle, 13, awakens to love, sexuality, death, class divisions and the mystery of life on a farm in a Devonshire village during the summer of 1984. Alison's father drinks himself into a stupor on rough cider and neglects her overworked, unhappy mother. Pamela, her older sister who's always preoccupied with dating, seems remote. Her two brothers-Ian, an insomniac chess prodigy, and Tom, a bumpkin who feels closer to animals than to people until he falls swooningly, comically in love-will come to blows over the same girl. Meanwhile, Jonathan, a viscount's son, rescues Alison from drowning, but their platonic friendship is declared off-limits after a barn they explore accidentally catches fire. Through stories told to Alison by her crippled grandmother, the lives of the girl's relatives and of villagers-their tragedies, courtships and crises, over 50 years-are revealed. Pears evokes unspoken bonds of love, a sense of community, organic connectedness to nature in a remarkable debut, a work shot through with moments of great tenderness, beauty and emotional power. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
This captivating debut novel roams the dry valley of a rural English village during the summer drought of 1984, revealing lushness in simplicity and the awesome untapped power and wisdom of a girl on the verge of womanhood. Through 13-year-old Alison Freemantle, the youngest child of a once poor but now surprisingly prosperous farming family, readers discover the long and endearingly quirky history of the Freemantle clan. Alison has plenty of time to ponder the past and present (although rarely the future, which seems not to tempt these rural inhabitants), since the town floats in a state of limbo as a result of the severe drought that has ``poured a hot glue that slowed everything down.'' Alison makes the most of the heightened sensibility the weather invokes in her family and her neighbors, and with the free time afforded by the end-of-summer teachers' strike, she weeds her way enticingly through the family's sordid past. (Beyond the three generations in her house, the rest of Alison's relatives inhabit a derelict street called Rotten Row, where years of inbreeding result in the occasional ``unaccounted child here or a mismatched aunt there.'') Alison recounts her mother's discovery that her father was a closet alcoholic and how this disease eventually led to memory loss that keeps his family only faintly familiar to him. She breathes life into a vampy sister (at least she'll escape), her eldest brother, Ian (chess genius, heart-breaker, and heir to the farm), and her chubby brother, Tom (uncomfortable with people and ``bound to the land from birth''). She shares the development of a new and precious friendship with the son of a local viscount; and she offers details of other valley dwellers, including the rector's love affair with a Portuguese maid. Pears includes more tragedies (deaths, betrayals, illnesses, fires, disappointments) than successes. Yet this tale remains heartening as Pears reveals the secret beauty of the hard life of the land through unsentimental and magical prose.
Booklist Review
This wonderful first novel tells the story of life beneath the blazing sun in a small rural village in England during the devastating drought of 1984. The long, absorbing plot unfolds through the eyes of Allison, the youngest child of the Freemantle family. Allison lives with her parents, siblings, and grandparents on the family farm, and as the long, blistering summer passes, she weaves a tale about the lives of past, present, and future members of her family and village. By the end of the narrative and the approach of the first rain in many months, Allison's family has been changed forever, each character undergoing a transformation of sorts, ensuring life will never be the same. Pears' gentle and consistently surprising writing style masterfully evokes the parched summer and brings to life the introspective narrator as well as the other idiosyncratic characters that populate this novel. ~--Kathleen Hughes
