Safe Return Doubtful

Published 2022

This is a curious mix of light and dark, the cosy and the sinister, in a folkloric, occasionally with a gothic lean, tale of a decrepit country house in the 1960s to which a family arrives to work.

The protagonist Izzy, 13 years old, has been taken out of school to look after her sick mother, while her father works as handyman at the house. She cooks, and looks after her two younger siblings.

Like many disillusioned children in literature, she has an imaginary friend, a green man she meets in the woods, where she roams when her mood is low. As times passes she spends more and more time in the forest, appreciating the nature and the atmosphere, and her time with the green man.

For its main part this reads like a YA novel, a sort of Famous Five, but in its denouement it gets much darker. Kerr manages to give the book the feel that it was published at the time it was set.

It’s curious, as I said at the outset, as it invites many questions having finished it; could the green man be real for example, just a confused war veteran who, like Izzy, couldn’t settle in society.
There are also questions also, about a strange man’s hidden relationship with a pubescent girl, though maybe that’s my mind wandering. In that regard, it brings to mind, Graham Joyce’s excellent The Tooth Fairy, where a similarly aged teenager, a boy, is visited by an imaginary friend, not entirely for innocent reasons..

My GoodReads score 4 / 5