Visions of Grace by Alison Littlewood
Publisher – PS Publishing
Published – Out Now
Price – £18 hardback £2.99 ebook via https://pspublishing.co.uk/visions-of-grace-ebook-alison-littlewood-6707-p.asp
Katie is almost six. She’s very much looking forward to her birthday party, with her mum Leanne and sister Chloe and of course her very best friend, JoJo.
Grace has no daughter, no mum, no family, but she loves her friends next door, perhaps especially Katie, since she has no child of her own.
It’s a good life. It’s enough. So when Grace begins to see things that can’t possibly be there, strange visions that seem to portend something happening to those she cares about, it’s a mother’s love she feels. A mother’s rage. A mother’s determination to protect them . . .
Ghosts are fascinating to us. They can mark as signs of something horrible that took place, they can be kind, they can be warnings. That merging of past, present and future uses for them is of course quite well handled by a certain Christmas ghost story but in Alison Littlewood’s new novella Visions of Grace do not expect some heartwarming scenes. Here the ghosts are heralds to a tragedy to unfold
Grace is a middle-aged woman who has found next door a warm welcome in the form of her fiend Leanne and her daughters and most of all the nearly six-year-old Katie. For a woman who lost her own mother tragically this has brought her immense happiness every day to be included as ‘Auntie Grace’ but one night Leanne enters her own home to find Katie’s best friend Jo Jo staring at her from the sofa. She is soon no longer there. This starts a chain of events and further visitations that plunge Grace into a terrible feeling that immense danger is coming, and she needs to work out where ethe threat is coming before it is too late.
There is a lovely balance of light and shade in this story and one slowly eclipsing the other. We meet grace herself as a child on the last night she saw her mother and we can see why Leanne’s family has finally perhaps allowed grace her own piece at what she has missed out on. As such with the eerie visitation of JoJo we feel that panic rising that something has gone terribly wrong. Little wood can create a heartwarming storytelling and then a child in a dark room staring at you from the sofa can becoming quite chilling. Littlewood makes us feel Grace’s confusion, concern, anger and despair at how no one else is seeing what she sees. For a short novella it is full of narrative energy pushing us along to a simple children’s birthday party where everything could go wrong.
I’ll be circumspect on the plot as its quite key to the story’s ending and those of us familiar with the types of ghosts there can be may soon realise which type of ghost story we are in. That does not mean it’s less effective. In fact that can be more devastating as we can see Grace’s past is the fuel for her to do the right thing whatever the cost to herself. Her own loneliness and perhaps desire for Katie to have the happy childhood she do not may mean she will do whatever it takes. A skilled piece of storytelling awaits you. It will not deliver Christmas cheer but perhaps instead to all a good fright?
