Description
Idealistic girls and young women of different faiths live a life devoted to education, justice, equality and humanity in a Belfast hostel called Helen’s Hope. Polly, the central figure and narrator, is the teenage daughter of a struggling Catholic border shopkeeper. Her beloved mother has recently died from the dreadful flu virus. She suffers violence at the hands of her once loving but now deranged brother suffering from PTSD. This prompts her to flee her home and seek refuge in Helen’s Hope. Though Polly suffers much, she remains a joyful, enthusiastic young woman determined to make things better for herself and those she meets.
Her generosity to a damaged, bigoted, bullying fellow inmate, Ivy, reveals her profound human sympathy. Though her quixotic actions sometimes have undesired consequences, her heart is always in the right place. Like Don Quixote, her ideas also come from reading books, in particular by her favourite writer of school stories, Angela Brazil. Her coming to terms with her lesbian instincts is subtly and naturally depicted. There is nothing evasive in the way sectarian conflict, misogyny and violence are handled; all forms of stereotyping are neatly subverted by Wilkinson’s beautiful writing.
