Penny Dreadful's actual name is Penelope Jones. It's the nickname her dad gave her because she is so often a magnet for disaster.

In the book's first story, Penny decides to become a hairstylist because she learns that hairstylists can charge $15 for a haircut. She would only need to do one and a half haircuts in order to pay her mom back for her last disaster and go to Monkey Madness safari park with her sister. (Penny's math was a little off since she needed almost $26, but whatever.) In the book's second story, Penny finds a dog, decides he's been abandoned, and tries to find a home for him after her mom refuses to let him stay with them. In the book's third story, a School Inspector is scheduled to visit Penny's school, and everyone is supposed to be on their best behavior.

This was one of my book purchases for my youngest niece. I found it entertaining in a "please don't let the kids get any ideas" kind of way.

In the first story in particular, Penny wasn't so much a magnet for disaster as she was an architect of disasters. Part of her seemed to realize that her hairstylist idea would be frowned upon. But since it wasn't specifically forbidden, she decide it would be fine, even though she'd previously been forbidden from using her parents' scissors due to past incidents.

Penny meant well in the second story, but she couldn't rein herself in, much less a dog, and so of course it all blew up. The second story was probably my least favorite out of the bunch, because one of the things that happened to the dog would have required surgery in real life.

I will grant that, in the third story, things were already going pretty wrong when Penny got involved - all she did was make things a bit worse, and even then it was an accident that could have happened to several other students in the class. Here's hoping Penny's poor teacher doesn't regularly have days as bad as that one.

Penny's narration had a breathless quality to it, and she tended to include lots of numbered lists and words in all caps. I found it a little exhausting, but I'm hoping her energy will appeal to my equally energetic niece.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

For once, I've purchased the kids' Christmas presents early. They're each getting two books. I'd like to read them all before my vacation in November. This one's for my youngest niece.

"The Queen Of Bloody Everything" is an astonishingly good novel that tells the story of Dido Jones and her relationship with Edie, her unconventional mother.

Daughter of a flamboyant, convention-challenging. larger-than-life mother and absent any knowledge of her father, Dido has no greater desire from the age of six to thirteen than to be normal and in a "real" family. She satisfies this desire initially by adopting the family next door, weaving herself into their lives so thoroughly that her presence is taken for granted.

Starting with six-year-old Dido moving from a London squat to an Essex village in the exceptionally hot summer of 1976 and carrying on into Dido's adult years, "The Queen Of Bloody Everything" captures the language and attitudes of the times perfectly, displaying them to through the eyes of a child and the adult remembering being that child.

The storytelling is very accessible despite following a clever and complex structure. It starts in the present day, with Dido talking to her hospitalised mother, and reveals itself through a series of recollections of Dido's life in chronological order, interspersed with commentary in the here and now.

It is a riveting read, filled with strong, believable characters, realistic dialogue that is crammed with life and truth and scenes that capture moments of triumph, deep cringe-worthy embarrassment, abuse and loss and sometimes, a little bit of hope. 

Dido's understanding of herself and her mother is deeply shaped by her reading and the gap between the worlds she reads about and the life she's lived. In the beginning, the chapters have names that refer to children's books: "Heidi" or "Third Year At Mallory Towers". Later, the literary signposting of the chapters becomes more adult with titles like "The Bell Jar" or "Brighton Rock".  

My heart was captured by the characters but what really intoxicated me was Joanna Nadin's ability to help me to see the same thing from multiple points of view at the same time: how I felt then, how I feel now, what I failed to see then, what I wished I could do now and so on. She embraces the complexity of real life where questions have more than one answer and narratives overlay one another over time like layers of lacquer on our lives.

Both the ambition and the craft of this approach are shown on from the first page of the book. It starts:

Now

So how shall I begin? With Once upon a time, maybe. The tropes of fairy tale are here after all - a locked door, a widower, a wicked stepmother, or a twisted version of one at least. But those words are loaded, tied; they demand a happily ever after to close our story, and I'm not sure there is one, not yet.

 

Besides, Cinderella was never your scene: 'Don't  bank on a handsome prince, Dido,' you would sneer through the cigarette smoke that trailed permanently in your wake; that cloaked you, tracked you, like a cartoon cloud in Bugs Bunny. Like Pig-Pen's flies. 'If they bother to show up it'll be late, and then they'll only beg or borrow. Or worse.' And the twelve-year-old me would roll her eyes , like the girls in books did, and think, Those are your princes, Mother, not mine. And I'm not you.

 

But I am, aren't I? Though it's taken me four decades - half a lifetime - to admit it.

I fell in love with the tone of this writing from the first page and stayed faithful to it to the last.

"The Queen Of Bloody Everything" was intense, sometimes funny often painful but always felt like the truth to me. The ending is perhaps a little more hopeful than one finds in real life but even that felt like a benison of sorts to the characters and the reader.

I strongly recommend the audiobook version of "The Queen Of Bloody Everything". Kelly Hotten's narration is perfect. You can hear a sample of it below.

I liked the book so much that, having listened to it happily, I went out and bought I a hardback copy so I can keep it to hand.

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This is astonishingly good and the audiobook narrator is perfect. 

It's the story of Dido Jones. Daughter of an unconventional mother and absent any knowledge of her father, she has no greater desire from the age of six to thirteen, than to be normal and in a "real" family. Starting with six-year-old Dido moving from a London squat to an Essex village in the hot summer of 1976, it captures the language and attitudes of the times perfectly, displaying them to through the eyes of a child and the adult remembering being that child.

Now if only it counted towards a Halloween Bingo square.

I always like these kinds of suffocating, small town with a big secret kind of books. In fact, I dare say I wish I'd written Paradise myself. It was a good length and unravelled perfectly.

Billie was a sweet, sympathetic character and I couldn't help but root for her the whole time. I just wanted her to catch a break. She was stuck playing mum but it didn't turn into a Cinderella/'oh woe is me' type story. She just got on with it and tried to do the best for her family, which was admirable. I wish there had been more about Eva and their burgeoning friendship - if that's what it was. Billie's romance did not seem too forced either. It unfurled organically but Joanna Nadin didn't dwell on it too much because it wasn't the most important love story in the book.

The water theme was appropriate as it is definitely a story of staying afloat during life's storms, rebirth, washing away the past, and starting again. The end was heartbreaking, although you kind of see it coming, however it was still a bit of a shock. It was a bit of a punch in the gut for Billie who had already been through so much but the ending had a glimmer of hope.