A coming-of-age tale in a time of fear. Read the full review on Grazia.
‘The Yorkshire Ripper haunted our childhood,’ says Jennie Godfrey, who was 10 years old and living in West Yorkshire when Peter Sutcliffe was finally captured, after murdering 13 women in the north of England between 1975 and 1980. ‘Kids even played “Ripper chase” in my school playground, which was a take on "kiss chase".'
‘The women in my community must have felt those words as they looked around at their husbands, their fathers, their neighbours, and their brothers,’ Godfrey tells Grazia. ‘The impact on communities and families was immense. Women became fearful of men as a consequence of themurders, and we lost our trust in the world and its safety.’
The subject of racism and immigration, which is a powerful theme in thebook, takes on a new meaning when you read the book in the light of this summer’s Southport riots, making you question how far we’ve actually come as a society since the 1970s. ‘I wrote the book in 2020, before theriots, and some of the earliest readers of the book commented on how awful racism was back then, and how great it is that things have improved,’ says Godfrey. ‘But I’m not sure we’ve come quite as far as we think.
In later life, Godfrey’s father became a chaplain in high security prisons, working with murderers like Fred and Rose West, and Ian Huntley, something Godfrey thinks was his way of dealing with the appalling crimes that happened in his hometown. 'Perhaps he was trying to make sense of something that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, make sense.’
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