Judith Sullivan is a writer in London, originally from Baltimore. She is working on a crime series set in Paris. Fluent in French, she’s pretty good with English and has conversational Italian and German and 20+ years in Leeds improved her Yorkshire speak.
The spirit of the late and so very great Daphne DuMaurier hovers over this novel like a benevolent literary angel married with a malevolent deviser of plots. I mean that in the best possible way. Set in DuMaurier’s s stomping grounds of Cornwall, The Wicked Girls features creepy old houses, whispering ghosts and women straining in the evil traps set by untrustworthy men. The local pub is called The Smuggler’s Dog.
The plot centres around the small town of Peneerie, where in Victorian times a maid named Eliza Tyer took her life on her 17th birthday and several of her contemporaries followed suit. Eliza and the other suicides seem to have legated Peneerie with a curse causing future local girls to commit suicide on that birthday. The focus is on three contemporary schoolgirls Ruby Greenwood, Hetty Mainwaring and Naomi Grosvenor, all three of whom turn 17 during the course of the events in the book.
One of the girls dies, which sets up the present-day events. Eliza’s Curse has long been a myth in Peneerie and even the most level-headed parents are understandably jittery. Roby’s single mum Kat is especially distraught, grappling as she is with her maternal responsibilities, financial concerns and an ultra-modern home that is slipping into the sea. Most of Girls is told in either Kat’s or Ruby’s voice. The timelines do jump around but the basic race is towards Kat’s possibly lethal impending birthday.
Also present in the book are the yummy mummies in Kat’s social circle, many of whom are parents of kids at the louche private Trelawney Academy Ruby and her girlfriends attend. All the parents are frantic and express the jitters in different ways. One of my favourite elements in the book was the interplay among the mums, in which none of the women manages to hide her own insecurities and biases amid the general malaise. Kat is a fully rounded character, troubled and impoverished but determined to make the best of a difficult situation.
Watkins cleverly weaves in the gothic Victorian plot points with those that could only surface now – access to internet porn, the malice of the manosphere, teens’ dependence on their mobile phones. The spirit of Eliza, wronged by men, slithers through the pages reminding the reader that men have disdained and disrespected women for centuries. Watkins doesn’t rely on a soapbox but relies on the stories of her adolescents and their 40-something parents to remind us that relations between the sexes are often lopsided. Eliza’s suicide note asked Who would want to be a woman in this world?
The story races along despite the shifting timelines and the questions the book asks are relevant and important. Watkins has crafted a small community that is believable and eerie at once and The Wicked Girls is well worth a trip to the Cornish coast (and a possible reread of Rebecca or Jamaica Inn).
