Babs Horton - Recipes for Cherubs

Well there's a relief ... Babs Horton's editor and publicist from Simon and Schuster came down to Plymouth for a big launch party for her latest novel, Recipes for Cherubs. Babs and her family were taken up to London for the big summer bash Simon and Schuster holds for authors of their upcoming titles. They made and released a fine promotional video for the book (well worth watching).
SO what's wrong with that? Well, we share the same publisher (my own Suffer & Survive comes out from Pocket Books on August 4th) but I had no launch party, no video, got invited to no summer bash. I'm not quite a star.
SO what's the relief?
I stayed up late to finish Recipes for Cherubs last night. It's terrific. Babs Horton (Royal Literary Fellow down at the University of Plymouth) is wonderful too. This book deserves everything going for it.
In fact, far from being disgruntled, I think Simon and Schuster should be doing more for it. It's gone straight to mass market paperback and I understand sales are doing well, but in literary terms this should be attracting stellar reviews. Reading it I thought first of Dylan Thomas for the dialogue, the interweaving portraits of eccentric yet normal lives in a small Welsh seaside town of 1960. Then I reckoned the more regular comparison would be with Rose Tremain, maybe Deborah Moggach. Without Babs Horton's Plymouth connection, I fear this book might have passed me by.
The plot's grand and artfully played out, so you are left turning and pondering to the end. Lives of a dramatic crew from 18th century Italy run a parallel story, as characters will eventually cross seas and time for lives to be shown as linked (I like this notion of inheriting our ancestors).
In teaching writing, I like to show how to 'write with attitude' ... and this book offers many beautiful examples of that skill. So many strong-minded wilful characters, clear about what they are seeking yet open and growing along the way as we learn to see their environment through their eyes.
A great read all round ... heartily recommended.