I made it! I’m genuinely amazed! May has been a really busy, slightly chaotic month and I can’t believe I managed to sustain my daily novella reading and posting. I’ve enjoyed it so much, and a massive thank you to everyone who has liked and commented, and ignored grammatical errors and general waffle, as some of these posts were written when I was very tired 😊

Many of you will know Simon has also been doing his #BookaDayinMay project, so it feels very apt to be finishing with a book he reviewed this month which had me scurrying off to spend my bookshop.org vouchers. The Driveway Has Two Sides by Sara Marchant (2018), is published by the lovely Fairlight Moderns and it arrived just in time!  

The Driveway Has Two Sides follows the arrival of Delilah on an East Coast island. “The matriarchs” of the island are sceptical of this self-contained young woman.

“They were taciturn by nature, and the environment on the island required tact, discretion, and independence.”

They watch her clean out her house and start to reorganise her garden. Some of their questions are answered when Delilah changes out of her overalls into a dress, in order to greet a man the matriarchs judge as “too old for his long hair and overly blue denim jeans.”

This is Alan, Delilah’s married lover who is paying for everything. He’s entirely self-focussed and just likes Delilah as a pretty young thing to feed his ego, the same as his sports car:

“Delilah’s silence was one of Alan’s favourite things.”

Delilah doesn’t seem too bothered by this, as she views her relationships with older men as transactional. With Alan the material gains are obvious. With Ted, the sweet, kind, widowed Sherriff of the town, she wants his gardening know-how:

“She saw his gardening instinct win out over lust. She hugged her arms around her waist. She loved older men.”

There is a lot about gardening in this novella, which is a big win for me, I loved all the descriptions of garden plans and planting. But if you’re not into gardening don’t let that put you off, it’s not overwhelming!

“The shades and variations of green, highlighted by the specimen plants that were not green, looked more than natural. They looked supernatural. It was an Impressionist painting come to life. It was a masterpiece. Ted was an artist.”

We follow Delilah as she gets her physical house in order, while trying to work out how she is going to live. (Teeny criticism: there is talk of her ‘completing’ her garden. Any gardener knows you never complete your garden!)

“Later, during his trips by her house, Ted watched as she developed her kitchen garden in the front. He understood her reasoning; there was more room, more sun, a fence to use as garden bones. He still found it scandalous, yet also intriguing, he had to admit.”

The titular driveway is shared with her mysterious neighbour, someone even more contained than Delilah. He is attracted to her, as is seemingly every man in the book. Their relationship builds, and so in a sense the plot is who of three men Delilah will choose.

But that’s not a plot that particularly interests me, yet I enjoyed Driveway. I enjoyed it for its depiction of small-town life, its gentle humour and its humanity.

Unusually for me, I finished the short novel for once wishing it had been longer – I would have liked to have met Maisie Thompson, Delilah’s  “friend and sparring partner” who we only hear about (unless I’ve forgotten a brief portrait near the start) and I would have loved to have had more of Mrs Oakapple and her fellow matriarchs.  I also really wanted to know by the end what one of the characters did next.

The Driveway Has Two Sides is a gentle, quick read, especially recommended for those who like Katherine Heiny or Anne Tyler. I’m hoping Sara Marchant is going to be one of those authors who return to the same setting in further novels, so I can hear much more about the town and its sparky, kind residents.