Month: Feb 2025

Review: May All Your Skies Be Blue by Fíona Scarlett (2025)

Blurb

Summer, 1991.

Dean: sun-stung and sticky with cool ice-pop juice, walks to the middle of The Green to get a good gawk at the new salon. And at the owner’s kid. Hands deep in his pockets, his jet-black mop of hair hides the tension in his face at the thought of going back home.

Shauna: stands well hid behind her ma – her eyes dark and haunted like the rest of her. The salon is theirs, a fresh start. The smell of her ma’s Body Shop perfume clings to her jumper – Shauna can’t be anywhere else other than here.

Instantly inseparable, their friendship blooms. But as time passes and tell-tale blushes and school fights develop into something deeper, conflicting responsibilities threaten to pull Shauna and Dean apart.

When all seems lost, will they find each other under the same blue sky?

Review

Many thanks to the publisher for inviting me onto the blog tour for May All Your Skies Be Blue and for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

I was so excited to read this book, but also slightly trepidatious, for two reasons: firstly, I’d ADORED the author’s previous novel, Boys Don’t Cry, so my expectations were (excuse the pun) sky high, and secondly, the ominous packet of tissues sent with the proof copy I received, which suggested I was in for another utterly heart-breaking reading experience. I’m not sure whether I was more afraid of crying as much as I had with her previous book, or not being as moved, but in the end, I can tell you that Fíona Scarlett has somehow done it again. May All Your Skies Be Blue is as rich and raw and emotionally stirring as I could have wished for, with characters that feel completely fresh and original and yet totally real.

The writing is so beautiful – it captures the vivid colours and brightly lit feelings of childhood and adolescence perfectly, and the style, with gorgeous use of dialect and a startling eye for descriptions, is unique and full of depth. It’s a properly immersive novel, one where you take a deep breath before you dive in, and swim through it without wanting to come up for air. The characters, from the protagonists Shauna and Dean to their friends and family, are so well-drawn that there is an almost documentary-like feel, particularly to the present storyline sections where different clients enter the salon for their appointments. You can visualise every one of them, and hear the conversations – this is the mark of a storyteller at the top of their game.

The structure works really well, weaving the single day of appointments at the salon in among flashbacks to Shauna and her mum’s arrival in the Dublin neighbourhood in the early nineties and the growing bond between Shauna and Dean over the years. It’s sophisticated without being distracting, and it builds up such a sense of lives intertwining and paths crossing, of dynamics playing out over many years, so that even though it’s not a huge novel, it has an epic feel and span, a sense of lives lived, of changes undergone and phases left behind. It’s so structurally clever, but it never feels overly literary because of the down-to-earth nature of the characters and the beautiful realism of the prose.

It is important to go into this novel without spoilers and without too much advance knowledge of the plot, so I will keep this review brief, but suffice it to say that if you loved Boys Don’t Cry, you will NOT be disappointed by this next novel. When I wrote my review of BDC, I talked about what a rare thing it is for an author to be able to pull so much emotion out of the reader without it feeling sentimental or forced in any way, and to create characters whose voices echo in the reader’s head long after they finish the book – I think it must be even rarer to conjure up the same magic again in an entirely fresh story. Fíona Scarlett’s gift for gently breaking our hearts and giving us characters who take us on such powerful emotional journeys surely puts her among the very best of contemporary storytellers, and I can’t wait to see what comes next from this astoundingly talented author.

May All Your Skies Be Blue by Fíona Scarlett is published by Faber and is available to purchase here.

Check out the other lovely blog tour posts for more reviews of this beautiful book!

Review: Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey (2025)

Blurb

Where there is wonder, there is love – an unforgettable story of the beauty and savagery of the Alaskan wilderness, from the author of the million-copy international bestseller, The Snow Child.

‘I read with my heart in my mouth, filled with wonder’ Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
‘An enthralling novel about the endurance of love, the power of forgiveness and the savage, irresistible allure of wild places’ Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train

Birdie’s keeping it together, of course she is. So she’s a little hungover on her shifts, and has to bring her daughter to the lodge while she waits tables, but Emaleen never goes hungry. It’s a tough town to be a single mother, and Birdie just needs to get by.
And then Birdie meets Arthur, who is quieter than most men, but makes her want to listen; who is gentle with Emaleen, and understands Birdie’s fascination with the mountains in whose shadow they live. When Arthur asks Birdie and Emaleen to leave the lodge and make a home, just the three of them, in his off-grid cabin, Birdie’s answer, in a heartbeat, is yes.

Out in the wilderness Birdie’s days are harsher and richer than she ever imagined possible. Here she will feel truly at one with nature. Here she, and Emaleen, will learn the whole, fearful truth about Arthur.

Review

Many thanks to the publisher and to the Squadpod for my ARC of this book, which I received in exchange for an honest review. It came with a copy of The Snow Child, which I hadn’t read for years, so I reread that first and was just as enchanted as I had been the first time.

Black Woods, Blue Sky is darker than The Snow Child, and there’s a more modern slant to it, as embodied by Birdie, a single mother bringing up her daughter on the edge of the Alaskan wilderness. It also goes harder on the magical realism, bringing to mind some of my favourite writers like Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter. There’s a tough beauty here that extends beyond the gorgeous prose and into the characters themselves. Birdie, Emaleen and Arthur are all utterly compelling, and the added perspective we gain from Arthur’s father, Warren, makes this a richly complex novel.

I was mesmerised by Eowyn Ivey’s writing in this novel – she conjures up the wilderness like no other writer, and plunges into the human heart just as seamlessly. The balancing act of terror and hope is woven around the reader like a spell, and I found myself captivated by the gradual, powerful momentum of the story. The tension is built so slowly and subtly, and the descriptions are both raw and beautiful – nature red in tooth and claw but also unbearably tender. It is so cleverly written that we enter suspension of disbelief as readily as a child listening to a fairytale, and we’re held in the story’s gentle grasp until the last page.

There’s an unexpected jump at the end that I thought worked brilliantly; it surprised me at a point in the book where I thought we’d reached an inevitable conclusion, and for me, it added a whole extra layer of meaning to an already deliciously nuanced story.

There is something so rich and strange and profound about this novel – it moved me so deeply, and I know it is one that I will revisit. I can’t recommend this book highly enough – it has so much to teach us about nature, about love, and about the power of stories. An unforgettable reading experience.

Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey is published by Tinder Press and is available to purchase here.