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REVIEW: Levitation for Beginners by Suzannah Dunn

It's 1972 and ten-year-old Deborah is living a ten-year-old life: butterscotch angel delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackajack and Jackanory, Layla and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos.

But new girl Sarah-Jayne breezes into school, pretty as a picture and full of gossip and speculation, as well as unlikely but thrilling stories about levitation. The other girls are dazzled but Deborah is wary and keeps her distance. That same week, eighteen-year-old brickie Sonny turns up on her doorstep with a stray tortoise and begins an unlikely friendship with her young widowed mum. That's bad enough, Deborah thinks, but then Sonny starts work on a site opposite the school and Sarah-Jayne decides he's the latest love of her life. Nothing escapes Sarah-Jayne, and Deborah fears what she'll make of her mum. It's good to be different, her mum often says; but not, Deborah knows, too different.

So, Deborah changes tactics, keeping her friends close and her enemy closer, even stepping up for some of Sarah-Jayne's levitation sessions. Then she's invited to Sarah-Jayne's lovely house, where she meets her charming family and encounters Sarah-Jayne's big sister's fiance, Max, which is when she senses that all isn't quite as it seems.

An enchanting story that walks that razor-thin line between friendship and something more, exploring the relationships that leave parts of themselves with us through life. It holds up a lens to magnify the power of friendship, the intensity and heartbreak they can bring especially as a pre-teenager, as well as bringing back some painful memories of that awkward age trying to figure out who you are while trying to be someone you’re not.

We walk through memories of Deborah’s pre-teenage years in the 80’s, and are transported back to a time when everything was intense and important, everything felt important and the world was so much smaller; with the oddly jarring effect of her recounting childhood thoughts but through the lens of a grown woman with a new perspective. The entire story took on that intensely dreamy nostalgia, almost like reading through a haze that became more suffocating as the secrets that are always hiding in a small town start to creep out.

The storytelling was a quiet stream of thought simply capturing a moment in time without any peaks and valleys or plot movement. It was lazy, but not in a bad way, in a very slowly relaxed way similar to those hot, long-summers off school that took its time and meandered playfully through school trips, discos and boys on bikes.

It was strange, everything took on this almost magical glow despite the mundanity of the surroundings, creating a real sense of child-like wonder that I’ve not felt in a long time. A portrait of youth and the love between friends, this was a striking and poetic story that will strike a chord with so many readers.

⭐⭐⭐
  • Levitation for Beginners will be available from 4th April with Little, Brown Book Group. I received an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review. 
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