Families, Charlotte Mendelson's delicious fourth novel confirms, are as unknowable from within as from without. Marina's is no exception. Westminster Court, the apartment building in which she has largely been raised, squats in a poky corner of unlovely Bayswater. Inside, it's a little patch of Hungary.
With her very English mother, Laura, she moved there to live with her maternal grandmother and two great-aunts after her father vanished. Rozsi, Zsuzsi and Ildi are refugees from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and their extravagant hand gestures, dramatic eyebrows and fondness for cold sour-cherry soup make them irresistible. "Dar-link!" they cry out in greeting, their accents dusting everything with "snow and fir and darkness".
What's lacking at Westminster Court is privacy. The "oldies" are everywhere, whipping back shower curtains, quizzing Marina about boys and menstruation. Timid Laura has fully surrendered to her in-laws' nosy love, but 16-year-old Marina is desperate for space in which to reinvent herself. She adores them; she must escape them. Hence Combe Abbey, a second-rate boarding school deep in the English countryside.
Swotty, sincere Marina is a girl acutely aware of her own failings. She is "shy; clumsy; short; fatherless; scared of cats, and the dark, and the future." But rather than confer the ugly-duckling transformation she craves, Combe Abbey magnifies her perceived inadequacies. One term in, she realises what a terrible mistake she's made. If only she could tell her mother.
Instead, she drifts into a fumbling liaison with a boy in the year below, whose father, a handsy telly don, seems to know more about her background than Marina herself. While Marina falls prey to OCD ticks and attempts to use the shorter OED to predict the future, all that continental exuberance turns out to mask still deeper secrets back in Little Hungary. Even Laura has things to hide.
Mendelson writes like a dream, blending deft social farce with fond, steely observations as her heroines become ever more stuck in tragi-comic quagmires of their own creation. There are moments of agonising hilarity; there are unspoken avowals of love - puppy love, maternal love, love that feels like possession; and there's darkness of the kind that lurks in the best fairy tales.
Indeed, poor Marina often feels like a maiden – or a troll. What she is is a determinedly original addition to literature's venerable line of teenaged misfits. Anyone who's grown up to become a reader will relate, yet it is her aged relatives who steal the show and whose voices linger after you've reached its satisfying finale.
