A sensuous retelling of Sleeping Beauty

Sarah Crown enjoys this modern-day fairy tale set in the Forest of Dean

Kate Hamer’s sentences are like miniature portraits: vivid arrangements of words that conjure up place with a magician’s legerdemain. This, her second novel, is set in the Forest of Dean, which comes alive under her pen and luxuriates in its strangeness: “In the forest the seasons reverse,” she writes. “In summer the darkness is lush, the canopy taking the heat of the sun. In winter the light falls through the bare branches like light through bombed out stained glass, just the lead work cutting into the sky.” It is a place of depth and tangle; a fairy-tale realm where anything can happen.

Fairy tales are Hamer’s currency. Like her debut, The Girl in the Red Coat (2015), this novel is filled with symbols – orphans, mirrors, witches; cottages in the woods; handsome princes. Her imagery is eclectic, but in each book there is a guiding fable; The

Girl in the Red Coat was a modern Little Red Riding Hood, and The Doll Funeral looks to Sleeping Beauty.

It opens on the heroine Ruby’s 13th birthday – a freighted moment. Whereas in Sleeping Beauty the attainment of sexual maturity is symbolised by the pricking of the heroine’s finger after she disobeys her father, here Ruby’s loss of innocence is finding out that she was adopted. This looks like good news – her father is a weight-lifting, quiff-sporting, schoolgirl seducing nightmare. But the discovery slides her into chaos.

From here, the novel cuts between three stories: Ruby’s, set in 1983; then, 13 years earlier, the tale of another young girl, who is pregnant; then there’s Shadow, some kind of spirit.

Reading the novel feels like picking through clotted undergrowth – ideas and stories germinate wherever you look. The question is, do they choke the path entirely?