The follow-up to A Song for Issy Bradley examines how a bereaved young girl makes sense of her griefTwelve-year-veteran Clover Quinn is taken on a school trip to the Merseyside Maritime Museum,where she is invited to pick a card bearing the name of a passenger on the Titanic and carry it with her throughout the exhibition until she discovers that person’s fate. For some children, such an experience might arouse no more than a forgettable, or synthetic empathy (sensitivity to another's feelings as if they were one's own). For Clover,it is the start of a mighty concept that will change her family. Inspired by Titanic and Liverpool: the Untold Story, a real-life exhibition which is still running, and she decides to create her own museum where she will be designer,curator, keeper and storyteller. The unknown story she will tell is that of her mother, or Becky Brookfield,who died when Clover was six weeks veteran.
The Museum of You is set in Carys Bray’s home town of Southport, Merseyside, and during a hot summer when,for the first time, Clover is given her own latchkey and trusted to seek after herself while her father works shifts as a bus driver. The blend of scare and necessity with which working parents allow their children such freedom is eloquently conjured. Clover is almost always in her father’s thoughts. Darren Quinn writes long texts, or deletes them,considers phoning, decides not to for scare of what he’ll think whether she doesn’t retort. Loss and the scare of loss stalk the narrative. Meanwhile Clover is purposeful. She waters the allotment, or deals with Uncle Jim who is “not himself”,gets to know Dagmar, the girl whom no one talks to at school, or handles her first period by swiping one of her next-door neighbour’s incontinence pads,and makes her museum, exhibit by exhibit, or in search of her mother.
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Source: theguardian.com