Review: The Colour of Milk

The Colour of Milk 
Nell Leyshon
2013

'this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand.
     in this year of lord eighteen hundred and thirty one i am reached the age of fifteen and i am sitting by my window and i can see many things.

i am not very tall and my hair is the colour of milk' 

Since moving to London I have had a lot more time on my hands to read. My friends and boyfriend are back home in Somerset and the two people I live with work in catering so are basically never here. To fight off that 'I have no friends' depression and avoid wallowing I have been throwing myself into reading. It has been SO good. I'm cracking on with Anna Karenina still but I picked this one up just before I moved in a second hand bookstore. I have seen it around a fair bit on the interwebz and it is on the Fiction Uncovered list for this year (which now I want to look into). I thought I'd have a break from Levin philosophising about farming and read a book about, well, actually, farming for the most part. 

It has been quite some time since I have read a book in one sitting. Mostly because, you know, life and stuff. But I can't imagine reading The Colour of Milk any other way. It's a short book and one to be devoured and devour it I did. 

The Colour of Milk tells the story of Mary (whose hair is the colour of milk). She is 15, works on her father's farm, shares a bed with her sisters and generally leads a not particularly great life. The father is a figure of fear and violence lurking behind the text and the power of the patriarch in this society is well and truly evoked. When Mary is sent to the vicarage to look after the vicar's sick wife she enters into another unhappy, male dominated household. She finds affection and knowledge but, most of all, danger.

There are women's rights things in here that made me so mad (Mary is pretty much sold by her father and some other guy knocks a girl up, claims complete innocence and gets away with it). From this perspective it is a very interesting read. It manages not to fall into the territory of 'poor downtrodden girl finds man to save her' by having a completely wonderful and totally un-fair-maiden-y protagonist. Mary is bold, witty and goes straight for the jugular with everything she says. Her voice even added humour to a book that I imagined could only be humourless. 

I loved the repetitive nature of the writing and the way it has been written as Mary herself would write it. There is a distinct lack of punctuation and capitalisation and it is written in a very believable dialectic voice. It comes frequently back to Mary saying 'this is my book and i am writing it by my own hand'. Sometimes I can find that a bit gimmicky but not here. I loved it here because it makes the ending even more shocking. I'm obviously not going to give the game away but what starts as a seemingly average story about life on a farm in the 1800's changes quite dramatically. It is so good and it caught me completely by surprise and pretty much left me reeling. I love it when a book has the power to knock you for six.

I would highly recommend this as a refreshing take on the downtrodden girl.

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