#BlogTour ‘The Gosling Girl’ by Jacqueline Roy

About the book…

‘A tour de force of engaged storytelling. With heart-wrenching pathos, The Gosling Girl delineates the bleak aftermath for all concerned when one child kills another’ Peter Kalu

Monster?                    Murderer?

Child?                         Victim?

Michelle Cameron’s name is associated with the most abhorrent of crimes. A child who lured a younger child away from her parents and to her death, she is known as the black girl who murdered a little white girl; evil incarnate according to the media. As the book opens, she has done her time, and has been released as a young woman with a new identity to start her life again.

When another shocking death occurs, Michelle is the first in the frame. Brought into the police station to answer questions around a suspicious death, it is only a matter of time until the press find out who she is now and where she lives and set about destroying her all over again.

Natalie Tyler is the officer brought in to investigate the murder. A black detective constable, she has been ostracised from her family and often feels she is in the wrong job. But when she meets Michelle, she feels a complicated need to protect her, whatever she might have done.

The Gosling Girl is a moving, powerful account of systemic, institutional and internalised racism, and of how the marginalised fight back. It delves into the psychological after-effects of a crime committed in childhood, exploring intersections between race and class as Michelle’s story is co-opted and controlled by those around her. Jacqueline writes with a cool restraint and The Gosling Girl is a raw and powerful novel that will stay with the reader long after they have turned the last page.

Many than ks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours, and publishers Simon and Schuster for my tour invite, and gifted e-arc of ‘The Gosling Girl’, which is published on January 20th in e-book, hardcover, and audiobook formats.

A hugely powerful and moving story of identity, who constructs it and how, this is a book which will have everyone talking. The inflammatory nature of the central motif-the murder of a child, by a child-is deliberately so. It makes you challenge your expectations of how you imagine a child like this would behave, the redemptive nature of incarceration and whether rehabilitation is actually ever possible.

The very title says it all-this girl is defined by the crime for which she is accused and imprisoned for . And then, when she is released into a world which would prefer her rotting, locked away. it is only natural that she would gravitate towards someone she knows, after accidentally bumping into, a previous inmate of a youth centre. Now closed, this girl’s history is turned upside down, technically, she has on paper had everything she could want to make a success of her life. And yet , she has been demonised and chucked away by a society which has no use for her anymore.

Both Michelle and her friend Lucy are victims of a different kind, Michelle has been systematically let down again and again, so that when Lucy is found dead, with Michelle’s DNA on her, the finger is squarely pointed at her, threatening everything she has tried to build since leaving incarceration. This includes Otis, her rescued dog named for singer Otis Redding, the tiny flat of which she is so proud and wanted to show Lucy because, for once, she wanted to be the one that people envied instead of felt reviled by.

And once back in the system which is so institutionally racist, how will Michelle fare? What if someone finds out who she is? The police officer who brings her in for questioning, is also black, and well aware of who Michelle is. There is wonderful contrast between the two women, and a knowing which comes from being both female and black in a patriarchal and racist society.

This is even more evident when Zoe, the woman who is hoping to reignite her career-and her finances-by writing an expose of the Gosling Girl case is explored . She has repeatedly told Michelle that this is her chance to put the record straight, however, for me, she reminded me of the witch from Hansel and Gretel, sitting in her office all stylishly done up and offering Michelle sweet treats in turn for revelations that she, Zoe, can spin into gold for the cost of a Tube fare.

The inherent anger at the misuse of this little girl/woman comes secondary, to me, to the crime she is alleged to have committed. To look back further you have to contextualise the death of Kerry Gosling, the systems whose corruption allowed this, and continues to allow the subjugation of the abandoned, the unwanted and misjudged.

Powerful and searing, this is a novel of strength, anger, and injustice. Thoroughly recommended.

About the author…

Jacqueline Roy is a dual-heritage author, born in London to a black Jamaican father and white British mother. After a love of art and stories was passed down to her by her family, she became increasingly aware of the absence of black figures in the books she devoured, and this fuelled her desire to write.

In her teenage years she spent time in a psychiatric hospital, where she wrote as much as possible to retain a sense of identity; her novel ‘The Fat Lady Sings’ is inspired by this experience of institutionalisation and the treatment of black people with regards to mental illness. She rediscovered a love of learning in her thirties after undertaking a Bachelors in English, and a Masters in Postcolonial Literatures.

She then became a lecturer in English, specialising in Black Literature and Culture and Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, where she worked full time for many years, and was a tutor on The Manchester Writing School’s M.A. programme.

She has written six books for children, and edited her late father’s novel ‘No Black Sparrows’, published posthumously. She now lives in Manchester.

Twitter @Jacquel27815478 @simonschusterUK @RandomTTours