The Earth Hums in B Flat - Mari Strachan

"Every night, 12-year-old Gwenni Morgan flies in her sleep. She leaves the bed she shares with her sister and soars into the night sky, listening to the nighttime sounds of her small Welsh village below. Irrepressible Gwenni -- a dreamer full of unanswerable questions and unbounded curiosity -- is childlike yet touchingly adult. Reluctantly facing a modern world, she prefers her nightly flights to school and her chores. Blessed with the uncommon insight of a young girl, Gwenni's view of the world is unparalleled.

Quaint, odd, touched, funny in the head: Gwenni is all too familiar with the taunts of her peers and fields them with equanimity beyond her years. She knows she can no more change her nature than stop the sun from rising. And when a neighbour goes missing, Gwenni turns amateur sleuth, determined to solve the mystery of his disappearance. Little does she realize that the trail she's pursuing will bring her uncomfortably close to home, and a dark secret."

Didn't enjoy this at all, I feel tricked somehow by the synopsis. I found it really boring and a very weak storyline. Most of the book was spent describing old fashioned ways of living and depressing abuse stemming from mental illness.

The blurb on the copy I picked up suggested a mystery/ spiritual novel, so it was a great surprise to me that the mystery is dealt with very quickly and there is no spirituality at all. It hinges on the young protagonist, Gwenni, having no knowledge of the metaphor 'the black dog', i.e. depression (although I took it to mean anger in this case). To an older reader, therefore, the disappearance of Ifan Evans is explained pretty much immediately: Gwenni finds Mrs Evans with a bloody mouth (she assumes this is due to a visit to the dentist) and the youngest Evans daughter, Catrin, talks of having beaten her father's black dog with a poker to stop him being angry.

The rest of the book is ostensibly about the discovery of Ifan Evans' body and the subsequent search for the murderer, but the real interest lies in the slow unfolding of Gwenni's relationship with her mother, and the small Welsh community's quiet unravelling in the post-war years. Although never specified, the novel is set a decade or so after the Second World War, and so the weight of the losses from that conflict prove too much for some characters in the novel. People in the small town lose husbands, lovers, children, and hope - it drives one character to suicide.

The biggest discussion point for me in this novel is therefore the presentation of mental illness. One review, quoted on the cover of my copy, describes the book as 'blessedly unsentimental', which is one of its main plus points. The characters with explicitly-referenced mental illness (of which there are many) are described in a matter-of-fact way by children, who are often shown to be the victims of mentally unwell parents lashing out but continue to seek the approval of their parents. This is particularly true of Gwenni, who desperately tries not to anger her mother, although this ultimately proves impossible.

Age rating 15+. Just really depressing.