My name is Angharad and I am not mad. These are the words with which Carol Lovekin both begins and ends her second novel, quietly closing the circle. Snow Sisters is a heart-achingly beautiful story in which Lovekin echoes and reprises some of the themes and motifs of her debut, Ghostbird, whilst also broadening the canvas.At the centre of the story lies Gull House, its weathered stone the colour of storms, a place of nooks and crannies. We visit it first in the present, when Verity returns after an absence of twenty years. The house has been shut up for all that time, and it is full of memories and ghost presences. It is where Verity and her sister, Meredith, grew up, with their eccentric artist mother, Allegra, and their grandmother or Nain, Mared Pryce, who was a little bit witchy, and the most sensible woman Verity had ever met.Lovekins textured and carefully balanced narrative alternates between Veritys voice in the present, the story of her childhood at Gull House, and the voice of Angharad, a ghost-child who grew up in the house a hundred years before. It is an intricate structure that never falters or confuses. The tale gently unfurls, as secrets are revealed and sometimes explained. The prose is measured, lifted by keen observations of the natural world, and with occasional inflections from Welsh that make the words sing.One day Meredith finds an old sewing box hidden in the attic. It is a wooden box lined with faded paper the colour of a robins egg, and its contents include half a dozen little red flannel hearts in various stages of construction and a cross-stitch sampler sewn by Angharad Elen Lewis X 9 years X 1870. The discovery fires Merediths vivid imagination and awakens the voice of a troubled ghost. Meredith makes Verity promise not to reveal their secret to Allegra, who is a troubled ghost of a woman in her own way. She has never recovered from her fathers death, or from her abandonment by the girls father, Idris, when they were very young. She is selfish and deluded, and emotionally abusive to her two beautiful daughters, who thankfully have each other and their beloved Nain to turn to. Angharad had no-one. Bullied and brutalised by her brother, dismissed by her father, and betrayed by her mother, she has returned to Gull House to tell her story to Meredith and Verity, and to seek their help in finding closure.Once again, Lovekin has conjured a spell-binding story woven through with magic and ghosts, and peopled by women whose strengths and vulnerabilities are drawn with a sympathetic hand. As in Ghostbird, there is an older, wiser woman to offer solace, and a secret garden to provide sanctuary. There are birds and flowers, and the hint of myth. There are moths and April snow ... Lovekin mourns the damage that human beings do to themselves and each other, and celebrates the power of the natural world as a source of redemptive healing.Suzy Ceulan Hughes It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council. Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru. -- Welsh Books Council
