Levitation For Beginners
It's 1972 and ten-year-old Deborah is living a ten-year-old life: butterscotch angel delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackajack and Jackanory, Layla and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos.
But new girl Sarah-Jayne breezes into school, pretty as a picture and full of gossip and speculation, as well as unlikely but thrilling stories about levitation. The other girls are dazzled but Deborah is wary and keeps her distance. That same week, eighteen-year-old brickie Sonny turns up on her doorstep with a stray tortoise and begins an unlikely friendship with her young widowed mum. That's bad enough, Deborah thinks, but then Sonny starts work on a site opposite the school and Sarah-Jayne decides he's the latest love of her life. Nothing escapes Sarah-Jayne, and Deborah fears what she'll make of her mum. It's good to be different, her mum often says; but not, Deborah knows, too different.
So, Deborah changes tactics, keeping her friends close and her enemy closer, even stepping up for some of Sarah-Jayne's levitation sessions. Then she's invited to Sarah-Jayne's lovely house, where she meets her charming family and encounters Sarah-Jayne's big sister's fiancé, Max, which is when she senses that all isn't quite as it seems.
Reviews
LEVITATION FOR BEGINNERS transported me right back to my '70s schooldays. The clannishness and micro-cruelties of 10-year-old girls was brilliantly authentic. I especially liked the innuendo and half-grasped truths that filter down to Deborah from the adult world and the slowly building unease. I loved that nothing is over-explained; it all made for a deliciously unsettling read.
This is a novel about everything and nothing, sour and melancholy, with elements of sheer comedy and almost unbearable beauty.
Even if your childhood wasn’t overshadowed by David Cassidy and Spacehoppers, this evocation of the lethal gossip and antipathies of a provincial primary school shaken by the arrival of a pretty, confident girl who isn’t all that she would seem is sure to stir dark memories. Lovely stuff from a writer I thought we’d lost to the Tudors.
Powerful and unsettling. Dunn’s distinctive voice and knack for observation transported me straight back to my teenage years and had me gripped to the very end.
If the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, then the Seventies is most certainly on the other side of the world. Whether you lived through that time or not, LEVITATION FOR BEGINNERS is all about how it feels to be in that awkward age between childhood and adolescence. Looking back from adulthood, Deborah is able to unpick the mysteries of grown-up secrets and relationships that were truly baffling to her at the time. Packed with period details, this is a story that is alternately affectionate, nostalgic, chilling and mysterious.
A deceptively clever, unsettling and chilling read about the secrets and lies at the heart of a small community that feels incredibly, devastatingly true.
It's so brilliant, and sinister and well-observed. It reminds me of Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood but with something magical all of its own.
A bittersweet, nostalgia-tinged adventure, saturated in contemporary pop culture, with a steadily growing voltage from slow-build jeopardy and regular jolts of irony.
This is a wonderful, accessible story full of love, memory and the truth.
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