After reading Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain' it was a relief to get back to a book with a little action and pace to it. The book is about a woman in Victorian London (here's a bit of backstory: Laura is born into a well-off family, L's father has debts, L's father dies, L is on the streets looking after children while the mothers work, L falls under a carriage, L has her leg amputated, L marries her surgeon -- so far, so like most kinked romance novels). Unfortunately, L then falls for a navvie building the new sewer system in London and decides that the best course of action is to kill her surgeon husband by battering him about the head with a poker. This is where we come into the book. The tale is told well -- Myerson has a gift for the grotesque and the sense of squalor and misery abut to finery and wealth. The plot unfolds in a cut-up series of flashbacks where we can be put down in a new section anywhere in the last ten years of Laura's life. An older woman's lust for a young man is touchingly portrayed, as are Billy's feelings to Laura (although L's point of view is used throughout). On the whole, a good read, although not one for the squeamish.

Laura Blundy is an engrossing and engaging excursion into the dark side of total and haunting love; complete with gritty and an atmosphere that Dickens and Jack the Ripper comfortable in. A terrific and compelling, shocking and unforgettable. Gary S. Potter Author/Poet.

Set amidst the gritty poverty of Victorian London Laura Blundy is the mesmerizing exploration of a lost soul, a journal of obsessive love, and a harrowing tale that haunts.

The author of three critically acclaimed novels, most notably Me and the Fat Man (1998), Ms. Myerson has now created an otherworldly protagonist, an enigmatic woman capable of both nefarious acts and abiding devotion. It is appropriate that Laura Blundy's life, which is related in flashbacks, unfolds at a time when illness pervades; cholera takes its toll. London's city sewers are being built so that the city "will have a proper sewerage system and lives will be saved." Yet now the "normal stink of Thames," the dank sewer tunnels and the debris ridden river banks anchored by the Baptist Chapel with its forlorn, broken windows mirror Laura's murky thoughts, which are disseminated by Ms. Meyerson with candor and clarity.

Dickensian woes pale beside the travails of Laura Blundy; Dickensian villains are pussycats compared to her.

Once an educated daughter of privilege, her father's death and financial reversals have forced Laura onto the streets. She sleeps among the crawlers and dowsers on the steps of the workhouse with only a stained tarpaulin for shelter from the rain.

We learn that while imprisoned in Tatum Fields she was made to wear a thick foul smelling veil. When she protested that she could not see, the reply was, "There's nothing to see...This is it. This is the punishment - darkness and solitude - the best way to contemplate the errors of the soul."

She is 38 when we first meet her, "but my hair," she discloses is "mostly black and the teeth I had left still had their whiteness and though my waist measured a little more now than the curved gap of two men's hands, I still had a lot of my young girl's punch."

More than punch is needed when she is run down by an errant carriage, and "her woman's bones are crushed like eggshell" beneath the iron wheels. Ginger haired Dr. Ewan Lockhart anages to save her life, but not her leg which he amputates.

Eventually, Laura marries the surgeon, a "carrot-nob" as she calls him and goes to live in the home that he shares with his mother, Eve. The older woman is a harridan who makes no secret of her distaste for Laura, and demands attention from her top floor room by rattling "a tin of barley sugar."

But Laura pays no heed for her mind is consumed with thoughts of the child she bore when she was 15, earning a penny an hour making party streamers "whenever the work happened to come along." Unable to feed the baby she had taken him to an orphanage to which she returned each week, asking to see Child Z as he was known, until the day she was told he was no longer there. She pined, she yearned, she ached to find her lost boy.

"......the truth is you carry a child in you and it seeps into your bones," she says, "and infects you for ever and you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back...." She feels a similar addictive emotion for her lover, Billy, a married sewer worker some 17 years her junior. And, Billy, for reasons he cannot fathom is inexorably drawn to her.

Determined to be with Billy Laura commits a crime of unspeakable horror, which Ms. Myerson describes in grisly detail. However, this act is only prelude to an even more shocking denouement.

Laura Blundy is not a book for the faint of heart, but it is an unforgettable story propelled by currents of foreboding, and delivered with sinister, stunning panache. Ms. Myerson knows how to weave a spell and she weaves it mightily well.

I found myself wanting to know the characters' secrets more than the heroine herself. In the end, I felt a bit unsatisfied as I didn't think that enough of the book's questions were answered. Amy (the main character) drove me crazy by allowing Gary and Harris to be so vague and cryptic in their motives for their actions. She's very likable even if frustrating and flawed. I found myself rooting for her to put her foot down and stand up for herself. I suppose in a way, she does.

Also, the lack of use of quotation marks (did every issue have this problem?) caused me to wonder what the characters were actually saying vs. what they were just thinking.

Overall, I'm glad that I read this story but I wish that Julie Myerson had answered more of my questions.

More than a week after finishing this book, I'm still thinking about it. It's a puzzle. Perhaps if I reread it, I can figure it out?

Extremely well-written, sexy, perversely funny, scary and dark. Myerson is one heckuva writer. What a ride...

This book is a amazing! I work in a book store and when a customer recomends a book I usually read it. I am so glad I read this one. Julie Myerson writes with honesty I only dream of writing of.

I thought the scenes of Susan's "haunting" were excellently handled. Would love to have a little more fleshed out about her relationship with her sisters in the wake of her father's suicide. But, as to one of the main "events' - the affair, I'm afraid I just didn't buy it. The juxtaposition of the heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of the American, with the reserved coolness of the Briton wasn't enough for me to feel that this affair was 'real', and the passion just wasn't there for me. Lennie seemed to lack a dimension or something!

The novel is written in a very spare style, and we never are sure whether the 'hormones' of late pregnancy ARE a factor or not - Susan rails against this possibility.

Husband Alistair does seem a little bit of a Central Casting cliched husband, dismissive of his wife's trauma, shallow and patronising.

This book was a reasonable read to fill in some idle hours, but I wouldn't rave about it. For a more elegantly written, and ultimately more hopeful story of childhood emotional abuse, I prefer Jenny Diski's 'Skating to Antarctica', which I read at the same time.

Although there are outstanding qualities of style and characterization and quite interesting situations and relationships, I disliked the novel, because of an unusually unpleasant atmosphere, created mainly by the character of Frank Chapman, the evangelist fanatic.Also, I could not empathize with any of the characters.