On Sipsworth by Simon Van Booy
by Jennifer Kassebaum
This is Jennifer Kassebaum, owner of Flint Hills Books in Council Grove Kansas, for High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Summer Book Club Reading List.
Summer reading means different things for different people, but a good book is always in season. That is why I selected SIPSWORTH by Simon Van Booy as a book to review this summer for High Plains Public Radio.
Set in a small town in England in the winter, this story opens with Helen Cartwright returning to her home village after living abroad for six decades and after the loss of her son and husband. Helen’s life is as grey and morose as you might imagine England in the winter might be, until she befriends a tiny creature, a mouse, that she inadvertently brings into her home. At first Helen reacts as most of us might react: with a trip to the hardware store to find some apparatus to rid her home of the mouse. But as she confronts the creature one morning, she sees that the mouse has admirable qualities. In one of many lovely sentences that adorn this story, Helen observes on page 64 that “…. there must be something in gentleness, she ponders, some great power that people are not aware of….”
And that my friends is how I feel about this gentle, quiet book, which opens laden with such sorrow and loneliness, and then in the course of two weeks, becomes a much different story, one that is rich with new friends-- and a startling discovery about Helen who, as a grey-haired woman of a certain age, is surely invisible to most of her neighbors and those who watch as she walks to the market, to the library, to the hardware store. This story ends much differently than it begins, as the passage of time bestows new knowledge and a fresh outlook – as the passage of time often does.
We meet Helen on a Friday, accepting that her life is over and it is simply a matter of biding her time until her last day. But by Tuesday, when Helen watches the mouse as he delicately takes sips of water from a bottle cap and she names him SIPSWORTH, we see the rekindling of interest and curiosity in Helen. By the end of a fortnight, Helen’s flat is filled with new friends and the reader looks upon Helen in a much different light, much as Helen looks at her own life with a different awareness.
The author Simon Van Booy is an established author with whom I was unfamiliar prior to reading this book. In researching Van Booy, I learned that he was raised in Wales and came to the US to play football at a small university in Kentucky. He married and the couple had a child, but in 2008 his wife Lorilee died suddenly and unexpectedly from an undiagnosed medical condition, leaving him alone to raise the couple’s young daughter. He remarried in 2013 and lives in New York City with his wife and daughter—although I suppose the daughter is grown and independent now. But Van Booy’s experience with love and loss as a younger man undoubtedly informs the deep sadness and loneliness that the reader finds in the opening pages of SIPSWORTH.
So, when the heat of summer is oppressive, and you want a story with a happy ending to balance the harshness of the world, you would do well to add SIPSWORTH by Simon Van Booy to your reading list.
For the High Plains Public Radio Summer Book Bytes, this is Jennifer Kassebaum, owner of Flint Hill Books in Council Grove, Kansas.
