The Colour of Milk: A Novel

Image of The Colour of Milk: A Novel
Author(s): 
Release Date: 
December 26, 2012
Publisher/Imprint: 
Ecco
Pages: 
176
Reviewed by: 

The year is 1830 and Mary and her three sisters, Violet, Beatrice, and Hope live on a large farm with their diffident mother, crippled grandfather, and critical, abusive father. The family is poor and illiterate, and the girls do not attend school for they are needed to help with chores. From dawn to dusk the four young women are manipulated by the head of the household and made to handle tedious tasks, thus enduring a hardscrabble life.

Oldest sister Violet is discovering her womanhood. Beatrice spouts Bible verses wherever she goes, regardless of the fact that she cannot read. Hope is reserved, living in her own world. Mary, the youngest at 15, is spirited and a constant talker. She realizes she might get a beating, but that does not deter her from speaking her mind.

Mary is sent to live with the vicar to tend to his ill wife. The vicary is only a half mile from her home, which Mary desperately misses despite the hardships; however, she is not allowed to return to her homestead, for the money the vicar is paying for Mary’s assistance with his wife is greatly needed by Mary’s family.

Chores for Mary are tedious, although not as backbreaking as she was used to and she does food to eat and a place to sleep; but she has to contend with another servant’s cruelty and the advances of the vicar’s son. Noticeably denoted is the chasm between the classes and how the indigent are used and abused.

Though Mary has no formal education, she learns to read and write—yet with advantages often come great costs.

Written as a young woman’s journal, The Colour of Milk draws the reader into Mary’s tormented existence, giving it credence while showing her pain, confusion, and questions about life in the style of an untrained child with her anguish over her situation pronounced in her own uneducated terminology. Sentences do not have capital letters, many begin with the word “And,” and comments are not punctuated with quotation marks; yet one can plainly sense the heart-wrenching emotion of this girl by her prose.