"This superb ode to swinging Soho explores coming-of-age giddiness at the dawn of a new decade, through a year of saying “yes” to everything."
A suitably brilliant companion to A Calamity of Mannerings, Joanna Nadin’s Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is an enormously pleasurable coming-of-age page-turner that swings with the thrills of 60s Soho as it follows a year in the life of Birdy — a fabulously-conjured character who’s impossible not to love.
As a new decade dawns on New Year’s Eve 1959, Birdy (real name Margaret) dreams of literature-related romance and glamour (think Bonjour Tristesse). Unfortunately, reality is somewhat different: “Even my name – Margaret – is average (Princess Margaret notwithstanding, as she is a goddess amongst women). Why can I not be a Calypso? A Viola? A Genevieve?”
While Cambridge University is on the cards for Birdy, she wants “a life more like the fictional ones I keep reading about and less like the actual one I seem destined for – the dull suburbs, the safety of university in a honey-bricked city, then back to the suburbs to marry a Clive or a Colin and waste said education by having children who will repeat the process all over again.” After resolving to say ‘yes’ to everything, she befriends Charlie, a runaway aristocratic actress who secures her lodgings and a job in a Soho bookshop.
While Birdy’s Soho adventures are a blast, and often funny as they reveal the swell of 60s liberalism, the book also explores conservative constraints of the era. In Birdy’s words: “There are some things that even today, in 1960, no matter one’s background, are considered ill behaviour: being homosexual is one, falling pregnant out of wedlock another.”
Also brilliant on the tricky liminality of being a young adult (“I am all for being grown up, but it’s such a shame we have to leave all the childish things behind”), Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is an absolute joy.
| Primary Genre | Young Adult Fiction |
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I suspect that in Soho anything can happen and frequently does.'
1960 is knocking on the door, and eighteen-year-old Margaret 'Birdy' Arbuthnot, presently of Surbiton, wants more than her current existence in the dull suburbs. She wants to LIVE - in capital letters! Could Soho, with its bright lights and dark corridors, hold the key to a life more novel-like and less… Surrey? (Even if Mummy thinks it is a square mile of vice, full of men with overly shiny shoes.)
At the cusp of the new year, Birdy resolves to only say 'yes' to everything for the next twelve months. She can't possibly realise that her biggest 'yes' will launch her directly into the London orbit of the aristocratic Mannering family, and transform her life into one worth writing novels about.
The joyfully funny companion novel to A Calamity of Mannerings, by Carnegie-nominated bestselling author Joanna Nadin.
Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' features in the following genres: Star Books, Young Adult Fiction, Historical Fiction, Children’s / Teenage fiction: Historical fiction, Children’s / Teenage fiction: Romance and love stories, Children’s / Teenage fiction: Humorous stories
Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is available in Paperback
Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' was written by Joanna Nadin and published by UCLan Publishing
Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' has 431 pages
£8.99
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