Page 45 Review by Stephen
"It's so easy to think of past generations as some other species, inhabiting period dramas, not as breathing people who lived and felt just like we do, despite the different context."
So wrote Sally Jane Thompson in the back after discovering a website full of photographs of "Victorians smiling - hanging out with friends, goofing off". She's absolutely right.
Under a classy cardstock cover in fawn, foul and a rich, chocolatey brown, a young American woman takes a break from London to visit the Derbyshire countryside, staying at a Bed & Breakfast and explore the ancient environment, both the bucolic landscapes and the old stone towns like Matlock. She picks up bobbins and shuttles and sits quietly absorbing the local mining industry over a steaming mug of coffee. And then, at night, she dreams…
Almost the opposite of an elegy, this a celebration and reawakening of life as it was then, reconnecting it to how it is now. Not so very different, considering. It's beautifully expressed, mostly in pictures which join the dots as well as any words, perhaps better. Words are proclamation; images are evidence. And these images owe so much in places to one of our favourite creators, Hope Larson of CHIGGERS, GRAY HORSES, MERCURY and SALAMANDER DREAM, particularly the magical elements.
Sally's been producing some beautiful work for a while, and here all the promise has come to a perfectly poised fruition, a complete comprehension of what to put it, what to leave out - when to leave a reader in peace to absorb for themselves.
At the time of typing, all our copies are signed and sketched in for free.
