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Muna's fortunes changed for the better on the day that Mr. and Mrs. Songoli's younger son failed to come home from school. Before then her bedroom was a dark windowless cellar, her activities confined to cooking and cleaning. She'd grown used to being maltreated by the Songoli family; to being a slave. She's never been outside, doesn't know how to read or write, and cannot speak English. At least that's what the Songoli's believe. But Muna is far more clever - and her plans more terrifying - than the Songolis, or anyone else, can ever imagine...
Reseñas (6)
School Library Journal Review
Stolen from her home in Africa six years earlier, 14-year-old Muna lives as a slave to Ebuka, Yetunde, and their two boys. When she is not cleaning or tending to the family, she is hidden in the cellar, her one refuge. Daily beatings and berating by Yetunde leave her silent and wary. And even the cellar provides no real safety, for she is regularly raped by Ebuka. But when the younger boy goes missing, things change for Muna. Brought up from the cellar and into her own room, given new clothes, and disguised as the family's mentally deficient daughter, Muna relishes her new position as the police question her and the family. Weeks go by, but the boy's disappearance remains unsolved. Throughout the questioning, it becomes apparent that not only is Muna not mentally deficient but she is intelligent, has learned English, and is determined to create a life for herself by using those who have cruelly taken advantage of her. Not knowing whom to trust and unaware of the wider world, Muna works step by patient step, exacting revenge upon this family. One by one, family members begin to realize that Muna has more power than they thought possible. By the end, readers will be pondering: Are killers born, or are they created? VERDICT Offer to mature teens who can handle the dark side of the human condition.-Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Reseña de Publisher's Weekly
Walters's nightmarish Cinderella story focuses on 14-year-old Muna, who was "rescued" from an orphanage by wealthy Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli when she was eight and has been enslaved by the couple ever since, including being beaten by the wife and raped by the husband. For the last six years, since the horrific Songolis moved from Nigeria to England, Muna has been kept in the cellar of their London townhouse, a situation that improves when the couple's 10-year-old son goes missing. The arrival of a very observant policewoman forces them to present Muna as their mentally challenged daughter and move her to a real room. Most of the book's dialogue is spoken by the members of the Songoli household, and reader Eyre's Nigerian English seems authentic. She's equally effective at finding a cool, no- nonsense English voice for the policewoman. But the upper-class British accent with which she tells the novel's story is so clipped it almost qualifies as parody. This distances the listener from Muna's torturous situation and undercuts the book's suspense. It also slightly buffers the graphic descriptions of violence and sexual abuse, which some may find a relief. A Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious hardcover. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
As the novelist brings out a new book after a long break, she talks about following in the footsteps of Ruth Rendell and PD James, violence against women in TV drama and why prisoners should be allowed to vote Good crime fiction avoids making too much of coincidence, and it is merely sad chance that the two most revered figures of recent English mystery writing -- PD James and Ruth Rendell -- should have died within six months. The sudden double absence, though, unavoidably feels like the end of an era and raises the question of who might continue this great female line. One obvious contender would be Minette Walters, who, since 1992, has published a dozen internationally bestselling psychological suspense stories including The Ice House, The Sculptress and The Scold's Bridle, which all became equally disturbing TV series. And yet, in a genre where star writers are encouraged to publish once or even twice a year, Walters has not released a full-length crime novel since 2007. On the literary circuit, this absence has been attributed to rumoured reasons, ranging from writer's block to having become a full-time Bo Peep to her husband's flock of Dorset Down sheep. So a visit to her home near Dorchester, via a picturesque but leisurely train journey along the south-west coast of England, feels like detective work. In a Walters novel, there would be a startling reason for this sudden book-end. I also have a slight apprehension about the possibility of being asked on arrival to have a look downstairs, because the writer has just broken her fictional silence with The Cellar, a contribution to the Hammer series of horror novellas, in which a gruesome story of child trafficking, sex abuse and domestic violence is played out largely below the stairs of a house in England. And indeed, during my visit, the novelist does open a wooden door to reveal stone steps heading down below, albeit smilingly: "There it is, almost exactly the same as in the book." Walters is poignantly aware that she is resuming publication at a time when two great careers in her field have just ended. She keenly read and learned from James and Rendell. "Both were towering figures who brought realism to the genre but, of the two, I think Ruth was the more influential because her originality allowed her to forge new paths. Her body of work is extraordinary, not least because of the number of books she wrote, and the unfailing elegance of her prose. She was a great writer. I admired her enormously and was very upset to hear of her death." The concern in Walters' novels with the wiring and misfiring of the psyche -- one book is called Disordered Minds, which might serve as the subtitle for all the others -- is very Rendellian. And the reason for her recent long gap between her own novels is appropriately, it turns out, psychological. "To be honest, I got to the point where I was beginning to be so stressed out and needed a break. I'm a very slow writer, and then I get stressed out with publicity and the whole business of getting a book out. And then it's people's expectations. I suddenly felt that I needed a life." The change of pace has also prompted a shift of genre: for eight years, she has been working on a large-scale historical novel about the Black Death, inspired by learning that the 14th-century plague entered England via a village six miles from her house. "I'm loving it, as it's so different, although I suppose you could say it's a crime story as there are a lot of corpses." There is evidence of her new "work-life balance" on the kitchen walls: a vertical flowerbed of Country Fair rosettes for the sheep that Alec Walters, after retiring from a career as a finance director, now breeds. There are also photos of their two sons and a recent first grandchild, although the novelist has issued orders that, at 65, she feels too young to be called "Granny". She broke off from her historical novel to write the horror story because the invitation from the Hammer series editor prompted an idea for a dark fairytale: Muna, the 14-year-old protagonist, has an evil stepmother who insists on being addressed as "Princess". "The first book I was ever given -- by my godmother when I was seven -- was Grimm's Fairytales," Walters recalls. "They're real horror stories, especially at that age. The way I look at horror is that it's half compulsion, half revulsion. You keep on reading no matter how revolting it gets." Crime novels can also provoke repulsion, especially in the depiction of violence against women, and even more so when the books are adapted for screen. There have been complaints -- including, this week, from the actor Jessica Raine -- that TV is too explicit in showing women as victims of sexual and other crimes. Does Walters recognise this issue? "I don't have a problem with violence against women in crime dramas. Murder is violent in real life, whatever method is used, and far too many victims are women. If fiction helps us learn how vulnerable we can make ourselves, then I applaud it." She also points out that women make up a large part of the ratings for crime shows: "I'd certainly agree that violence against women would be gratuitous if TV audiences were composed entirely of men. The motives of the writers and directors would be highly questionable in those circumstances!" Muna, in The Cellar, is both a victim and a perpetrator of terrible violence. When she begins to behave horrifically, she tells her abusive family, "I am what you made me," and the motivations and justification for aberrant acts are Walters' central subject. She is seriously considering enrolling on a course in criminology or behavioural science at nearby Bournemouth University. "I've done a lot of research into what makes a psychopath. Are they created or are they born? I would come down far more on the side of nurture than nature. The standard thinking now is that a child who is not shown love is in serious peril because they do not develop empathy." But a big question underlying crime fiction is whether everyone -- in a certain circumstance -- might be capable of murder? "Yes. I know that PD James did think that, but I don't. The example most people give is that, if you walked into your child's bedroom and found a man sexually abusing them, you'd want to kill him. But I don't think that's right. Everyone's initial response is not to assume that sexual abuse is happening. We say: 'Who are you? What are you doing?' Our initial instinct is to ask, rather than to rush to action -- which is partly why so many paedophiles got away with it." Walters is unusual among crime writers in never having created a recurring series character in the manner of James' Dalgleish or Rendell's Wexford. Every one of her books is, in publishing parlance, a standalone. There must have been publishing pressure for a long-running cop? "At the beginning, yes. The Ice House was actually sold as a two-book deal with the same policeman. When he wasn't in The Sculptress, my agent warned me I might not get it published. But everyone was fine about it. I just know I'd get so bored with a series. Agatha Christie ending up sending Miss Marple on holiday to Jamaica just to keep going." But her narratives are invariably dark. The Cellar has a different ending for its US and Canadian editions because the publishers wanted it to be more redemptive than the savage conclusion of the original manuscript, which contains a sympathetic portrait of a mass murderer. "It's so much more interesting to write a repellent character than a sweet, saintly one. I'd get bored of a totally nice character after three pages. But also I believe that the human mind is such a complex thing that we can be extraordinarily pleasant while the most terrible things are going on in our heads. A good example is the couple who have decided to divorce but haven't told their friends yet. And they have been at each other's throats for a year and can't stand the sight of each other but, for the moment, when they appear in public, they don't show it yet. And, when they announce it, everyone's shocked to discover that they hated each other. It's that aspect of human nature that fascinates me." The writer's insight into psyches is helped by having been a weekly prison visitor for a long period. She became fascinated by judicial punishment after researching her great-great-great grandfather, Joshua Jebb, who was Britain's surveyor general of prisons in the mid-19th century: a road beside Brixton Prison still bears his name. Although Walters had a financially tough upbringing -- her father died young, leaving her mother to raise three children on a widow's pension -- she has a posh accent, which, a prison governor warned her, prisoners would mock: "But I tried it and I think they found me a hoot. When they discovered I was a writer, one of them got one of my novels out of the prison library and brought it to me covered in handwritten notes to show me where I'd gone wrong." She says she never directly used her visits as research, but the encounters clearly provided a remarkable insight into criminals' thinking and speech: "You're never told what they're in for, but they unfailingly tell you. A bloke came in once and said: 'I'm not a child molester. I murdered my wife -- that's all.' That's all! Then he paused. 'And her boyfriend. I caught them in bed.'" In novels and films, women going into men's prisons often face sexual taunting and pressure. Did she suffer that? "No. Oddly enough, only when I went into a women's prisons. There's far more explicit sexual behaviour there. If you go in as a slightly vulnerable young prisoner, you really need to find quite a powerful woman to look after you. I've done talks in women prisons and there's an awful lot of snogging going on, sitting in each other's laps." The new UK government will have to formulate a response to the European court of human rights ruling that the UK must remove its ban on prisoners being able to vote. Walters points out the paradox that the voting ban is most unfair to those with the least-serious sentences: "I see the argument that voting is one of the rights that should be removed from you if you go to jail. Where I have the problem is that, if someone was incarcerated on 6 May and given a year's sentence, they'll serve six months and so -- once freed -- you will live for four-and-a-half years under whichever government has been elected. Is that fair? So I think there's a good case for allowing those who will definitely be released in the period of the next parliament to vote." At this point, I attempt to electrify the so-far cagey election campaign by seeking the endorsement one party would least want: from Walters' experience in prisons, is it possible to say which way most serious criminals would vote? "Absolutely not at all. I would have no idea." Walters' novels do touch on political issues: The Cellar, for instance, features a dodgy solicitor who encourages bogus compensation claims against the NHS. James and Rendell were both raised to the House of Lords -- so does she have ambitions to be Baroness Walters? "Not if I had to [go] up to London." Which party would it be? "Actually, I'm a genuine floating voter. I've decided that true democrats read manifestos and make a decision for the good of the country." Alec comes in for lunch -- a stew featuring one of his former lambs -- and it becomes clear that the brutality of human nature in his wife's novels is at least matched by animal behaviour. "We have quite a lot of ravens, and when a ewe goes down in labour, the raven will perch just behind and, when the lamb comes out, pecks its eyes out. So you come up and find a live lamb, but it's blind. You don't hear about that on Countryfile." A final question to a writer who continues the line of Christie, Dorothy Sayers, James and Rendell. Why has English crime fiction been so female-led? "I think most women are amateur psychiatrists. We're brought up to be like that. We think much more about the whys than most men do: 'Why has someone done that?' And that is an advantage in writing crime novels." * The Cellar is published by Hammer at [pound]12.99. To order a copy for [pound]10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on online orders over [pound]10. A [pound]1.99 charge applies to telephone orders. - Mark Lawson.
Kirkus Review
This short work reads like a recipe for evil and may well induce a nightmare or two. The Songoli family's peace is shattered when their young son disappears, but this tragedy is a blessing for 14-year-old Muna. With Scotland Yard on the case and the media close by, the girl they stole from an orphanage, kept in the basement, and mercilessly abused is allowed a bedroom, clean clothes, and the status of "daughter." Yetunde no longer demands to be called "Princess" and pretends maternal affection during police interviews. Ebuka's sexual assaults and even son Olubayo's leering and threats have tapered off. Since the family members believe their own repeated statements about Muna's being illiterate and brain-damaged, they can't conceive of her as a threat. This portrait of an immigrant family living in a white world is densely layered. The attention of investigators is insulting and condescending at times, and it's easy to instinctively take the Songolis' side, only to remember they're monsters with a terrible secret. Walters (Innocent Victims, 2012, etc.) plays with that tension to great effect; each time a Songoli learns something new about what Muna is actually capable of it's a terrifying thrill...and it turns out she's quite capable. When she calmly tells Ebuka, "As your life gets worse, mine gets better" and repeatedly reminds the family that she's nothing more or less than what they've made her, this becomes less a taste of delicious revenge than a meditation on the consequences of abuse. Those brave enough to admit fault and apologize have some hope of forgiveness, but this is a defiant family for whom things more often end poorly and with true horror. That it's all related so calmly only increases the tension. Sly pacing and a detached narrative voice give this horror story exceptional punch. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Reseña de Booklist
*Starred Review* Fourteen-year-old Muna was kidnapped from a Nigerian orphanage when she was eight, and trafficked to London as a slave for the wealthy Songoli family. Since then, she's endured the abuse and indignities too frequently chronicled in recent news stories, expected to be grateful for the shelter of her cellar prison and the sustenance of occasional food scraps. When Abiola, the Songoli's youngest son, disappears after leaving for school one day, Muna is released from the cellar to masquerade as the Songolis' developmentally delayed daughter while the police investigate. But Muna is not as defenseless as the Songolis believe, and she sees this turn of fortune as her chance to use her hidden mastery of English to outplay her captors. This is psychologically and physically brutal yet breathless reading; Walters challenges readers' concepts of justice and casts light on the abetting role of passive witnesses. Ruth Rendell's Simisola (1996) and Lene Kaaberbol's The Boy in the Suitcase (2011) also approach human trafficking from a psychological-thriller perspective with similarly phenomenal, if less visceral, results.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist
Reseña de New York Review of Books
LET'S MAKE A LIST of the dubious delights that await you in HONKY TONK SAMURAI (Mulholland, $26), the latest outing for Joe R. Lansdale's perpetual bad boys, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. There's excessive violence (eye-gouging and such), to be sure, as well as raunchy language, sexist attitudes, tasteless humor, adolescent clowning around and general vulgarity. Not to mention characters named Weasel and Booger. Hap, who's proud to identify himself as a "very juvenile and pretty crass" rebel from East Texas, and his sidekick, Leonard, who's black, gay and tougher than rawhide, step into it with both feet when Leonard beats up a citizen on his own front lawn after seeing him abusing his dog. Then Lilly Buckner, a foul-mouthed old lady who recorded the dust-up on her tablet, blackmails them into looking for her granddaughter, who has disappeared from the dealership where she worked selling high-end used cars. It doesn't take long for Hap and Leonard to figure out that something hotter than vintage autos is being peddled from this showroom, but the nature of the merchandise and the extent of the criminal enterprise involved in its distribution will have the boys facing the Dixie Mafia. Lansdale's characters can be as down-to-earth as Hap's live-in girlfriend, Brett, who owns the private investigation agency where he and Leonard work. Others, like the transgender Frank, who acts as a front for the real owners of Frank's Unique Used Cars, are more loosely tethered to this green earth. And then there are the bad guys, from the bikers who ride with Apocalypse on Wheels to various locally grown sociopaths ("Some got three teeth and two are in their pocket"). Best of all are the women warriors like Vanilla Ride, who shows up for battle in "black leather pants so tight you could see the outline of a quarter in her pocket" and keeps a stash of sniper rifles in the back seat of her 1982 Buick. She's a pure computer-generated action figure auditioning for her own video game - and a ton of fun. WHEN YOU READ about sadists who have brutalized their housekeepers or au pairs, you try not to think about what life was like for those poor slaveys. But Minette Walters lets her imagination run free in THE CELLAR (Mysterious, $24) and emerges with an intimate and upsetting story about Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli, a rich immigrant couple from an unnamed West African nation who claimed 8-year-old Muna from an orphanage and took her to England. Confined to the cellar on a wretched mattress and allowed upstairs only to cook and clean, Muna is routinely raped by her master and beaten by her mistress (who insists on being called "Princess") until she's 14, when the younger of the Songolis' two sons fails to show up at school and a policewoman arrives at the house to question the family. Walters is no Ruth Rendell, but here she writes with the subtle cruelty and pitiless insights of that author's alter ego, Barbara Vine. There's no mercy in her depiction of the abusive Songolis, yet Muna enjoys a gratifying reversal of fortune when the visits of the police compel the couple to pass her off as their disabled daughter. And Walters has more sinister plans for this clever girl, who is soon able to declare: "I am what you and Princess have made me, Master," proving she has assimilated the lessons in evil she learned at their hands. TOWNS THAT FALL on the glide paths to airport runways are great locations for a book like WHERE IT HURTS (Putnam, $27), the first in a new series by Reed Farrel Coleman about Gus Murphy, a morose part-time house detective who drives a courtesy van between the Paragon Hotel ("paragon of nothing so much as proximity," according to Gus) and Long Island MacArthur Airport in Suffolk County. As an ex-cop, Gus was well acquainted with small-time crooks like Tommy D., who turns up at the hotel and gets nowhere when he begs him to investigate the murder of his son. Gus is too broken up about his own son's death to handle another father's grief, but when Tommy is also gunned down, guilt and "a sense of purpose beyond mourning" jolt him back to life. Although it's overplotted, Coleman's busy book - set far from the Hamptons in "those ugly patches we Long Islanders like to pretend don't exist"- has plenty of robust regional flavor. THE GOTHIC THRILLER is a treacherous genre, but Christobel Kent does a nice job balancing the requisite features of dreamy romance and eerie atmosphere in THE CROOKED HOUSE (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). When she was still in her teens, Esme survived a massacre that took the lives of her mother, twin sisters and older brother and left her father a brain-damaged wreck. You'd think that as a grown woman who now lives in London and calls herself Alison, she'd have the sense to stay far away from the scene of that atrocity. But her lover, an older academic who knows nothing of her past, sweet-talks her into going to a wedding back in Saltleigh, a bleak estuary town where "all roads led to the water" and the "fossilized stumps" of Saxon villages lie buried in the marshes. Although the father of the bride insists that "this is a perfectly normal village," Saltleigh's brooding atmosphere and history of violent tragedy make both the town and its unfortunate inhabitants seem hopelessly cursed.
