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    Ebook449 pages6 hours

    You

    By Joanna Briscoe

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    'A meditation on the lengths we will go to for love ... Briscoe is brilliant at conveying the obsessiveness of teenage love, ratcheting up the tension until the reader is every bit as involved as the character ... beguilingly good' Observer

    Cecilia is obsessively in love with her teacher, the older, married Mr. Dahl. She plots and speculates, yet she never guesses that what she dreams of could actually happen. Is it her imagination, or is the high-minded Mr. Dahl responding to her?

    Cecilia's mother Dora wants the good life. She and her husband moved to Dartmoor so their children could run wild, free to make their own choices and mistakes. But Dora discovers that there is more to the countryside idyll, and indeed to her own marriage, than she assumed, when she finds herself fascinated by the very last, the very worst person she could fall for: the elegant and dangerous Elisabeth Dahl.

    Now, after twenty years, Cecilia is coming home, to face Dora, and to face her past. But the excitement and pain she had thought were buried cannot be buried. The past is a dangerous place.
    ____________________
    You, the unnerving and exceptional novel from Joanna Briscoe, is a stunning story of sex, memory and family lies.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJul 4, 2011
    ISBN9781408819920
    Author

    Joanna Briscoe

    Joanna Briscoe is the author of five previous novels, including the bestselling Sleep With Me, which was adapted for ITV by Andrew Davies. She has been a columnist for the Independent and the Guardian, is a literary critic for the Guardian, and broadcasts regularly on Radio 4. Joanna lives in London. joannabriscoe.com @JoannaBriscoe

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    Reviews for You

    3.5/5

    50 ratings17 reviews

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    • 3/5
      As others have mentioned, the beginning of 'You' and its constant switching between the present and past is quite confusing, and at times I was tempted to just give it up. I'm pretty good at retaining what I've read, but even I had trouble at times remembering if I was reading about the present or the past. Especially considering most of it, past and present, all takes place in the same house. Additionally, Briscoe gets a little too flowery at times with the descriptions. I would skip chucks of text just to get back to actual action, not that there is a whole lot. I'm sure plenty would consider it beautifully written, but I was ready to just get on with the story already.Overall ... if flowery writing and constant time changes do not bother you, this probably would be an enjoyable read. For me, it took too long to get going and just did not hold my interest as I thought it would.
    • 2/5
      I almost gave up on this book after wading through the beginning, which had the story switching back and forth between time periods so rapidly that I had to go bo back and re-read a few times to figure out where I was. The last third of the book was pretty good, as it stayed in the present time long enough to keep me interested in finishing. Very melodramtic.
    • 3/5
      Confusing through much of the beginning of the book. The main character Cecelia's life is told in flashes of childhood and adulthood. During her childhood she becomes involved with a teacher at her school while his wife becomes romantically involved with Cecelia's mother. Confusing to be living it but more confusing to read about it. Still there are moments when the author chooses to stay in the present that the story does come alive.
    • 5/5
      I can see by the other reviews listed here that I am the only one that gave You a 5 star rating. Why? Simple answer is "I loved it". I have to agree with many that at the beginning it was extremely confusing with the changing time frames in the chapters. However, once it became clear to me how it was going to progress; I got caught up in the characters and their saga.Cecilia's childhood was spent living a bohemian lifestyle that was at times wild and crazy. Dora, her mother, was the bread winner of the family working at a nearby progressive school. Cecilia was a pupil in this same school and it is there that she met and feel in love with her English teacher, James Dahl. An illicit affair between student and teacher eventually ends with Cecila becoming pregnant. She give her love child up for adoption and there the story truly starts to evolve. This adoption haunts Cecilia her entire life. As fate would have it; she returns to her childhood home which brings her back to her old life and impacts her present life.The story and it's sub plots were fantastic stories that kept me intrigued right to the very last page. Since I was so skeptical at the very beginning; I was caught off guard by the power of You. Maybe for this reason alone is why I have rated it with 5 stars. I love to be challenged by a book and You presented several challenges for me. I sometimes became confused by the wording and several times I re-read pages because I felt like I was missing something. It all came together in the end although not every last piece of the tale is tied up in a pretty bow. I liked the challenge it presents to figure out what happens next.I highly recommend You and I am so pleased to have gotten an early reader's opportunity to read something I probably would not have chosen otherwise.
    • 2/5
      This is a perfect book for anyone who likes soap opera drama filled with multiple betrayals and ironic parallels. Cecilia, the main character, has an affair as a teenager with her English teacher, James Dahl. James' wife, Elizabeth, is simultaneously romantically involved with Cecilia's mother, Dora, who is still married to Cecilia's father. The complicated web of secrecy and lies accelerates, and eventually culminates when an adult Cecilia returns to her childhood home to live with her partner and three daughters. This is not a book for someone who wants a depth of plot or memorable characters.
    • 3/5
      This is the story of Cecilia, a woman who has moved back to her family home in a rural part of Devon with her partner and three daughters. It's also the story of her mother, Dora, who is recovering from a serious illness, prompting Cecilia's return home.The first half of the book has alternating chapters in the past and the present. Cecilia's past is linked with that of her former teacher, Mr Dahl, who she developed schoolgirl feelings for 20 years earlier. Dora's past is linked with Mr Dahl's wife, Elisabeth,for whom she also developed feelings. The second half concentrates mainly on the present, but with the truth slowly coming out about the past.You is a very difficult book to rate and review for me. I didn't much like Sleep With Me by the same author, and so I wasn't sure whether I would like this one at all. I found that I did like it but that somewhere along the way there was something lacking, something not quite drawing me into the story enough. I preferred the second half when the story was set in the present day, as this had more suspense in it, and was more about finding out the truth about certain things that happened.I certainly found it a readable book and never felt like I didn't want to finish it, it's just that it didn't totally grab me. I would still recommend it to people who like contemporary fiction.
    • 5/5
      I. LOVED. IT!!!! The author's eloquent discriptions of the moors are breathtaking, I felt like I could see all she was describing. I found the free lifestyle intriguing as well. It was interesting how it affected the family as the matured. I loved the alternating chapters, it was a great way to blend the story. The prose were wonderful, the stories within the story were wonderful, the characters were wonderful. I bet you can guess that I thought this novel was wonderful!! I will pass this book on to many customers I am sure they will in turn pass it on to their friends. I am looking forward to reading other titles by Briscoe.
    • 4/5
      Joanna Briscoe writes young children beautifully, immersing the reader in the strange and foreign country of an awkward, bookish girl's mind without a single seam showing. The best parts of this book are the ones that explore one of the two main characters' thoughts as a young girl trying to find in books what she lacks in her home life.The majority of the book, though, is concerned with two affairs: Cecilia, a young girl at the beginning of the story, has an affair with a married male teacher when she is seventeen, and Dora, her mother, has an on-again off-again affair with that teacher's wife that lasts more than two decades. Everyone is brought together by a series of contrivances - extensively remarked upon by the characters - that includes Cecilia's husband's work and Dora's cancer. One comes away with the impression that Briscoe can't commit to the premise of her novel, and it's a bit distracting.At the center of the present-day conflict is the identity and location of the product of Cecilia's affair with her teacher - a baby that Dora caused to be adopted outside the system. Pages are devoted to how Cecilia and Dora can't speak to each other on the subject. Pages are devoted to how Cecilia can't speak to her husband on the topic. It's unfortunate; the family intrigue is heartbreaking, but characters endlessly talking about how they can't talk to each other doesn't make interesting writing. It makes the reader long for the end of the book.Because Briscoe chooses to tell the story from both Dora's and Cecilia's points of view, there's very little mystery in spite of all the secrets that are being kept; a reader paying even a minimal amount of attention will begin to understand quite early where Dora placed the child, and the child's own advent is apparent to the reader long before either Dora or Cecilia figures it out. The book is surprisingly frank about teenage sex, and although the detail is well-written, it's impossible to forget that the participants are underage, and the overall result is a feeling of enforced voyeurism that is off-putting. Briscoe's evident attempts to humanize, rather than demonize, the teacher with whom Cecilia has had the affair are similarly creepy and read as inappropriate at best. The fact that the teacher never experiences any negative consequence from the affair adds to the sense that the narrative is attempting to excuse or justify his behavior, leaving Cecilia to bear the consequences and the condemnation of the other characters while he retains his marriage, family, and teaching position.it's an odd story, and not a bad one, but it went on for too long, and I did not enjoy it.
    • 3/5
      I can't say I liked this book, but on the other hand, I didn't exactly dislike it either. I didn't enjoy the skipping past to present to past at all. When the book caught up with itself, I liked it a little better. It was a different manner of writing and a different approach to the story. I did find the characters weak within themselves....not that they were written weakly, but they were weak characters. Living the lifestyle they were, I would have expected more, but maybe that is just the time it was set in. If you like relationship stories, or British authors, give this a try. If you like a little more action and angst....give it a pass.
    • 2/5
      This was a difficult book for me. Briscoe tells us what's happened rather than showing us. Dora is so uptight, can't deal with the guilt from her desires. I'm tired of whiney characters. Cecilia falls for her high school teacher--that's someone's wet dream, not reality. The father retreats from involvement. I'm tired of wimpy men.Her descriptions are meaningless "the sky ...was white and lined with recognition like a promise"--what does that mean? A sky can't recognize.
    • 4/5
      This book tells the story of a mother and daughter, each caught up in their own romantic obsession and how it molds their lives. Cecilia is a beautifully naive schoolgirl who falls desperately in love with the one person who she feels really understands her - her older, married English teacher, James Dahl. Her mother, Dora, came to Devon to live a Bohemian lifestyle but found that her husband is worthless and she must shoulder the burden of caring for her family. Dora finds an escape in a forbidden affair with the fascinatingly changeable Elizabeth Dahl, James' wife. Both women make unbearable sacrifices that tinge their relationships and break their hearts for the rest of their life. I found this book to be beautiful and heartbreaking. I loved the author's descriptions of the moors and Devon, and the way she brought her characters alive, especially when she describes Cecilia's and Dora's feelings of being in love. It could be a little hard to follow sometimes, because the time frame switched from present day to Cecilia's girlhood, but as long as you prepared yourself for the change at the start of each chapter, it wasn't impossible. Overall, I really liked this book.
    • 5/5
      Where I got the book: won on the LibraryThing Early Reviewer program.Cecilia has returned to the cottage on the Devon moors where she grew up, to care for her sick mother, Dora. This is the ostensible reason, but she is also drawn to the last place where she saw her lost baby. Amid the strange wildness of Dartmoor, she comes face to face with her past while Dora struggles to free herself from the ties that bind her.I began this novel with the uncomfortable feeling that I was not going to be able to adapt to Briscoe's rather self-consciously literary style after reading a slew of genre novels. And ended it with an appreciation of her clarity and command of language; this is definitely a writer who grew on me once I summoned the patience to settle into her world.I think I detected a fairly strong D.H. Lawrence influence, and one passage that just had to have been a tribute to Dorothy L. Sayers, thus:Sayers: Accepting rebuke, he relapsed into silence, while she studied his half-averted face. Considered generally, as a façade, it was by this time tolerably familiar to her, but now she saw details, magnified as it were by some glass in her own mind. The flat setting and fine scroll-work of the ear, and the height of the skull above it. The glitter of close-cropped hair where the neck-muscles lifted to meet the head. A minute sickle-shaped scar on the left temple. The faint laughter-lines at the corner of the eye and the droop of the lid at its outer end. The gleam of golden down on the cheek-bone. The wide spring of the nostril. An almost imperceptible beading of sweat on the upper lip and a tiny muscle that twitched the sensitive corner of the mouth. The slight sun-reddening of the fair skin and its sudden whiteness below the base of the throat. The little hollow above the points of the collar-bone. He looked up; and she was instantly scarlet, as though she had been dipped in boiling water.Briscoe: He looked up at the inn and she glanced at him on the seat beside her and examined him as though strongly magnified, followed the exact shape of the bone of his nose, his irises' confusion of pigmentation, rendered lighter in sunlight; wayward eyebrow hairs, a faint sheen of moisture on his forehead; the outer line of paleness that traced his lips, the strong cleft above the mouth, the sun-shot curve of his ear and a tiny scar on its outer edge. She could see the twitch of his pulse in his neck. He turned and she blushed, and the notion disappeared.Both male characters are very English in appearance. I love echoes like that--they make all literature seem like an endless conversation. Briscoe uses a rich imagery which shifts around in some interesting ways. Early in the novel, women--particularly the mother-daughter relationship--seem to represent safety and are connected to earth, while men represent danger and water. Later, the danger--and the water metaphors--seem to lie with the women, while men are safe and earthy. This may represent Cecilia's gradual willingness to come to some sort of peace with her past, while Dora struggles to break free. All very Lawrencian.Of course, if you mix water and earth you get mud, and a lot of this story seems to be about people who are stuck in the mesh of relationships that they have created. The moldering, damp cottage that harbors both warmth and family and a litter of decay and death--crumbling structure and dead insects--holds the protagonists in stasis. Briscoe carefully engineers the ending so that the stasis is still there but a glimpse of a way forward is afforded. (I found it amusing that, after railing against the non-tying-up of loose ends in a crime story, I was happy to accept the unresolved ending of You as author's privilege. What a difference a genre makes.)I guessed at the crisis and revelation in the novel by about halfway through, but that didn't stop me from turning the pages to see if I was right. Briscoe convinced me of her power to maintain a story, and I'll be looking for more of her novels.I also feel I should remark on the excellence of the editing; I didn't spot a single mistake, a rare treat. And I loved the cover design and the feel of the cover's matte, slightly textured coating. The whole package added up to a reading experience that kept me slightly on edge in a good way. If I were going to knock off half a star it would be because the book didn't grab me straightaway, but that would be splitting hairs. Good stuff.
    • 2/5
      It's probably not a good sign when I begin counting pages before I'm even a quarter of the way through a book, but the characters and the complicated web of relationships Ms Briscoe presents here simply failed to engage me. The setting, in Dartmoor National Park, is another matter entirely. Ms Briscoe obviously knows whereof she writes and perfectly captures the alluring, eerie and forbidding nature of that singular landscape of moor and tor, of bog and stream. I'm afraid I'm on the side of the dissenters on this one.
    • 4/5
      Having read the mixed review prior to mine, I have concluded this book was enjoyable and believable to me because I'm on "the other side of youth" where one realizes how a simple act or series of actions can have a profound effect on ones life as well as the lives of those close to them. Joanna Briscoe, has a keen understanding of the regrets and acceptance that comes with age. This is the first of her novels I've read, but I plan to try one of the earlier ones.
    • 3/5
      This book was just extremely difficult for me to get through. I cannot say that it was poorly written, but my main problem is the characters were all pretty repugnant and their predicaments unbelievable. These just did not seem like the real problems of real people, although the author tries very hard to convince us of that. I was not as confused by the constant flashbacks of the beginning, however, I don't think it was particularly effective to move the stories along. Although the writing is pretty good, I still would venture to say this falls into "chick lit" due to the mellowdrama and weird relationships. I thought the descriptions of the moors/area was very well done and maybe the best character in the book. Overall, it just was not my cup of tea. I am grateful for the opportunity to read and review an Early Reviewer edition though.
    • 3/5
      A family living a rather alternative lifestyle, not a bad one, just different...will affect the lives of the children. The father was not an ambitious man, and sadly he often took help from his wealthy family. His wife Dora and children lived in an odd and sprawling house, and grew up on the moors. This story revolves around one of these children, Cecelia. She was a bit different than the rest of the family, lacked the free spiritedness. She was more focused and serious. While attending an alternative sort of school where her mother had found work as a music teacher, she was unhappy and restless. Until James Dahl arrived on the scene. He was a teacher, new to the school and serious himself. His english classes were more structured and suited Celie and a few of her friends much more than the carefree teaching supplied by other teachers in the school. Celia was intrigued at first, and grateful to have a real class to attend. She excelled and along with some of her friends began to have a crush on Mr Dahl. A harmless crush on a special teacher who singled out certain students for special classes, encouraging them to seek out higher education. The crush however, began to change, to turn to obsession. Mr Dahl behaved properly of course. He was a family man with principles. He would never... or he thought he would never behave with impropriety towards a student. But of course, despite our best intention we sometimes fail at being good. We sometimes do things we know we should not do. The result of this failing was a baby. The pregnancy, the baby, was kept secret from nearly everyone. Certainly no one at the school knew, as Celie withdrew soon after realizing what had happened. Part of the alternative lifestyle her parents had chosen was paid for by having boarders. They paid in cash or in services.. work around the house, cooking meals..or sometimes in other ways. One of these boarders was a midwife, or so she said, and she helped to deliver the baby. The baby who was spirited away moments after birth. A new secret was born.. where had this baby been taken?Cecelia's life changed drastically after the birth. She became a bit of a rebel. She moved away from home and soon feel in love with a much older man, and another baby came into her life. Then two more children.. but the first child, the child surrounded by secrets was always on her mind. Another obsession. The way it played out was tragic, and surprising.
    • 2/5
      This is the story of a woman, Cecilia, returning to her childhood home to nurse her ailing mother, Dora, and, more importantly, to try to determine what happened to the baby who was taken from her at birth and given up for adoption. Structurally, this book is not an easy read, it shifts abruptly between times and viewpoints, and that makes it difficult to get into the story. Aside from that, I wasn't really a fan of the melodrama here. While in some ways it reminds me of Bronte novels (a longing for forbidden love, descriptions of the moors), the characters weren't that interesting. I did, however, find the relationship between Elizabeth and Dora a bit more interesting than the dynamic between other characters. I appreciated the opportunity to review this, but I just wasn't that crazy about the book.