Not quite what I was expecting from this book. I was hoping for a simple story but, unfortunately, it wandered too far down the religious road for my liking, and I was unable to finish it.

Girl with dove is the poetic memoir of Sally Bayley, telling the story of her early years via the stories she loved as a child. Whilst this was an incredibly quick paced read it was frustrating that the "juicy" bits of the story never seemed to be revealed. It left me feeling rather unsatisfied, wanting to know more of her story and less of the stories she read. I was sad that we never got the full story, only dribs and drabs that teased a deeper story. Whilst it was fairly enjoyable I will say that I was overall left quite disappointed.

I have read this book. I should have done so a long time ago. However, I did not enjoy it. I could not understand the Milly-Molly-Mandy references at the beginning because it was all wrong. I even checked my own copies to make sure I was not misremembering. I could agree with the Peter and Jane references and a later Janet and John one. I felt uncomfortable with the book from the start and could not see where it was going.

This feeling remained with me all the way through. Escaping into fiction is one thing but for me I could not distinguish what the author was trying to say through the use of the fictional characters be they Miss Marple, Jane Eyre or Betsy from David Copperfield.

I am not sure that you would need to be familiar with the above characters to understand the references made to them. I think perhaps someone who likes poetry might respond more positively than I do.

For a book-lover, I found this book hard to relate to, for some reason. It didn't flow for me and felt disjointed. I didn't enjoy it very much, unfortunately.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to read and review this book.

After losing and replacing my broken Kindle and getting a new phone I was unable to download the title again for review as it was no longer available on Netgalley.

I’m really sorry about this and hope that it won’t affect you allowing me to read and review your titles in the future.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.
Natalie.

Thank you for providing a copy of this book for review however I was unable to open the file for this document unfortunately! Apologies.

I disliked this book - although I read to the end, it was always in the context of waiting for something rather than enjoying what was happening. I kept waiting for it to warm on me and it didn't. I prefer not to give negative reviews unless I can help it, and so I am only providing feedback here.

To say this author had a strange childhood would not be an understatement. She lived with the rest of her dysfunctional family in a decrepit house with just women and no men on a permanent basis. Left mainly to her own devices, the main highlight was the local library where she lost herself in books, finding similarities with characters such as Jane Eyre and Jane Marple with herself. This was certainly a different way of writing a memoir! I liked it despite finding some of it confusing - like looking through a fogged up lens. Every time Miss Marple spoke I “heard” Joan Hickson’s voice! Apart from some topical things of the time, this book sounds like something from a few generations earlier with zany people doing strange things.

A testament to the transformative and healing power of reading and the unifying nature of public libraries.

Unfortunately I have added this book to the “did not finish” pile. The concept sounds really good but the writing style is not for me. I don’t like the fact that you can’t see the story for all the Book waffle. Just not one that I am enjoying.

The main thing I have to say about Girl With Dove is that I enjoyed reading it but I have absolutely no idea what it was really about. Thanks to this, I can’t even attempt to explain the plot.

The literary references in this book are fully integrated into the story and, although this was an interesting style which I liked, it made reading quite confusing. There were many times where it was too difficult to tell which characters were actually part of the story and which were just references.

It was interesting, unusual and very enjoyable, but too confusing and difficult to follow for me. I highly recommend giving Girl With Dove a try; hopefully you might be able to make more sense of it than I did.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

If every anybody needed an escape from reality, then it was Salley Bayley as she grew up in a very dysfunctional family where there were many changes in the adults in the home, and when her baby brother disappears from his pram one day then she is even more confused about the world around her.

And that is how books helps protect her. Encouraged by her mother at a young age to visit the library, Salley is soon mesmerised by the worlds she visits, especially by the female characters she reads about - Miss Marple, Jane Eyre - and uses their thought processes and experiences to try and make sense of her life through theirs. This was a fascinating way of dissecting many classic books and offered her comfort where there was very little in her immediate world.

This was quite a dark and often bleak read, considering the things she witnessed as a child. She only had books to turn to, until she did eventually did reach out to a Doctor about her health and this caused a huge split in the family.

It is beautifully written, if a little confusing at times with the constant switching of timelines and events, and a striking memoir and a different way of looking at how books can help us even in the darkest of times.

Whilst I enjoyed the read, I thought this a strange book. It seemed somehow disjointed. I’m not sure why we had the constant references to classics like Jane Eyre and Miss Marple. In fact, there were times when I got a little confused as to whether we were in a classic or still part of the original story

I would have liked.a little more explanation as to what was going on in the story instead of the cloaked references

An easy read despite this

I was smitten as soon as I saw the title – especially the subtitle – but I would soon discover that this is a book about books and childhood quite unlike any other I have ever read.

There were times when I was enchanted, and there were times when I was bemused; and I have to say that this is a very eccentric memoir indeed.

<I>‘Reading is a form of escape, and an avid reader is an escape artist. I began my escape the moment I started to read. Aged four, I already had sentences stored up; I knew some words and I could put them together in a line.’</I>

I couldn’t help but love sentences like those, the lovely mixture of childishness and poetry in the pose, and the way that Sally Bayley completely opened up the worlds of beloved books, taught herself lessons from them, and drew their characters right into her world. She needed all of that to help her through a chaotic childhood in an wildly unsettled household on the Sussex coast.

Three fictional characters — Jane Eyre, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and David Copperfield’s Peggotty in David Copperfield — became her touchstones; and they would inspire her to re-set the course of her life.

She put herself into care at the age of fourteen.

That might make you think of misery memoirs, but this book is nothing like that.

<I>'What’s the difference between laughter and tears? They’re very close. I think it depends a lot on your character, whether you laugh or cry. Some people like moping about. Others wouldn’t be seen dead near a tear. Speak for yourself, but I’m a laughing sort of person.'</I>

Sally Bayley launches straight into her story, and it felt like a stream of consciousness that was very nearly bursting its banks as it was so eager to show that stories and real life were inextricably intertwined.

The picture that emerges is of a bohemian household where people drift in and out. Her mother often took to her bed after her infant son disappeared from his cradle under the washing line and will always be unreliable; other relations – aunts and a grandmother – are a little more practical. Sometimes people are taken away in ambulances, and sometimes male strangers are found sleeping on the floor in the morning. One stranger is said to be her father, and he takes the family for a hotel meal; it was a treat but the children didn’t think that grapefruit for dinner a long way from the beach was a treat at all.

None of this is explained. Memories are scattered through the book, beautifully related, and you could just let them wash over you or you could try to put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. You would never find all the pieces but you might find enough to form an idea of what the whole picture might look like ….

It was a little like reading Dorothy Richardson: creativity and confusion!

But it was the books that made the story sing. They offered reliable adults, younger kindred spirits, and so many other characters with stories that helped to explain the world and the people who passed through the household. The way that the worlds created by Christie, Dickens and Bronte merged with the world of one bookish child was sublime.

<I>'Mr Dick’s brother places Mr Dick in a mental asylum. His family say this is necessary because of his madness. What they really mean is that Mr Dick is a peculiar sort of chap. Maze says that when you go all peculiar you are more than likely to find yourself flat out on the hallway floor without knowing how you got there. I think that Mr Dick was just too full of funny turns for this family to manage, After all, the hallway floor is a long way down.'</I>

The child’s voice is perfectly realised, and it is so east to understand how and why she drew fictional characters into her life, and how the things they said and what she learned about their lives offered her away to navigate through her own life.

Of course it was Jane Eyre who made her realise what she had to do:

<I>'Now, years later, I know for sure — it was Jane Eyre who led me away, Jane on her small brown wings. That winter I pushed aside the thick velvet curtain and I stepped onto the ledge. I ruffled up my brown wings; I flapped and flapped. Then I flew up into the sky towards the dark blue sea, where the Northern Ocean, in vast white whirls, coils around the naked melancholy isles; and the Atlantic surge pours in among the stormy Hebrides. I flew to the far off place where the spirit of Jane Eyre lived and breathes'</I>

There were things in this book that I loved – the voice, the literary appropriations, the style – and there were things that I was rather less taken with – the stream of consciousness, the short chapters, the lack of clarity – and I imagine that it will divide opinions.

When I consider ‘Girl With Dove’ as a whole though, I have to say that I loved its spirit, I loved its energy, and most of all I loved that a child in an unstable world could be guided to her path through life by a love of words and language and by the reading of the right books.

Author looks back on a disturbing childhood and finds solace in books. Quite interesting.

Not what I expected, this book by Sally Bayley is about being brought up in a dysfunctional family in which she feels out of place, leading to unusual consequences. An early reader, she finds inspiration from Jane Eyre, David Copperfield and Miss Marple.

Quite interesting in a higgledy piggeldy style, jumping back and forth in time and from one fictional character to another, it’s not the easiest of reads. Not really my sort of book but I’m sure that there are many who will be inspired by it. I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

You know when a book is trying too hard to be clever and innovative? Yeah. That’s exactly how I found Girl With Dove. I’m sure lots of people will praise the novel for it’s highly original style, but it just wasn’t for me. Frankly I found the whole thing confusing.

Girl With Dove is the autobiographical (I think – it’s hard to tell) novel of Sally Bayley’s childhood. She seemed to grow up in some kind of large extended family home/commune (again, hard to tell) with some pretty disinterested/depressed adults and (possibly) quite a lot of siblings, although they’re not really mentioned. She seeks refuge from the chaos at home in literature, specifically Agatha Christie, Bronte and Dickins and uses characters from these works to explore what is going on around her.

The short version of this explanation is – I don’t really know what this book is about. When I say that Sally Bayley uses fictional characters to explore her life, she quite literally quotes them, daydreams about them and uses them as a kind of shield to view her life from a safer distance. As you can imagine, this gets incredibly complicated. It doesn’t help that there aren’t that many big events that occur for the first 75% of the book, so it’s hard to work out the timeline and to separate fact from fiction (literally). It sounds like an upsetting story of neglect, but so many of the details are lost through the odd narrative style that I don’t really know what to think.

It’s interesting that Sally Bayley chooses three female characters from literature to help her to try to make sense of her life. She relies on Miss Marple, Jane Eyre and Betsey Trotwood – three strong, sensible, stable women who act as a weird kind of moral compass. I would guess that these characters appealed to her because she so obviously was missing a decent female role model (and also a decent male role model, but growing up in a house with no adult males this may not have even occurred to her). Unfortunately, filtering your life through fictional characters made me feel very removed from the storyline so I really struggled to emotionally connect with the book.

It didn’t help that I’m not familiar with any of the characters that she chose to feature so heavily in the story. Perhaps if I had been I would have found the novel easier to read, but without that knowledge I frequently found myself flicking backwards and forwards, trying to work out what on earth was going on (not easy on a Kindle).

I don’t doubt that Sally Bayley has fantastic literary skilks, but unfortunately the narrative was so fractured that I feel like she tried a little bit too hard to be innovative and ended up with a confusing mess. I’m going to guess that the jilted narrative flow was done on purpose to reflect the turbulent childhood that she experienced, but I needed at least a few clearly defined events to hang the rest of the story from. I think that in the last quarter of the book, the storyline does become clearer and I enjoyed that far more than the preceding three quarters, but it just wasn’t enough.

Overall, I loved the idea of using books as an escape from real life (who hasn’t done that?) but I hated the execution. I read a book years ago called “A Fucked Up Life in Books” which used the same idea but in my opinion did it far, far better. As I said before, some people will love Girl With Dove, but it just wasn’t for me.

I am finding it hard to describe this book. I wouldn't say that it is a particularly easy read, but there are moments when it is an addictive read as you want to know what happens as the book progresses. I did think that it was rather well written.

When Sally's baby brother disappears she is left with no explanation from her family. So, she resorts to using her imagination and tries to learn how to think like a detective. Her aid to do this is initially nursery tales, she is only six after all when this trauma occurs. Subsequently she progresses through all the Miss Marple mysteries, Jane Eyre and ultimately Dickens and Shakespeare. Quotations from all these sources abound in this story and full credit to Sue Bayley for merging them so seamlessly into her novel. A very different read and one that will hold great appeal to lovers of classic Victorian literature. Recommended.

I loved the concept of this novel and I was really looking forward to something a little different, but sadly it was just too different for me to enjoy reading. I loved the writing style and enjoyed reading individual sentences and paragraphs but just could not stick with it long enough to get a hold on the storyline. If I had a hardback copy I would keep it at home and enjoy bits and pieces in the same way I read poetry or Proust rather than as a novel. So....lovely writing but storyline was too slow.

I found this book hard work. Sally has intertwined her life with fiction. That makes it hard to work out and hard to follow. This is just not my type of book. Sorry.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.