Book: The Miseducation of Evie Epworth by Matson Taylor

A charity shop find and picked up after I finished Natives. With the remit of escapist books only for the rest of the year, this fitted perfectly but was over quickly!

Set in 1962, which immediately captured my attention and we race through a few months of Evie’s rural Yorkshire life in 359 short pages. As the blurb says, we meet teenage Evie after she has left school and is deciding what to do next, most likely continuing with her education. Until she learns that her potential step-mum is her dad’s housekeeper, who is the polar opposite of the mum she never knew but is about to find out about.

There’s a teeny bit of snobbery about how the uncouth working-class gold-digging Christine is vying to fill the shoes of the elegant, educated, travelled heiress that was Diana, her mum. But we see this all unfold through a 16-year-old who has only known her dad, their farm and their prim neighbour. We know she’s prim as she’s called Mrs Scott Pym. She is a fantastic friend to Evie along with her best friend Magaret who’s as obsessed with Cliff Richard as Evie is with Adam Faith.

This is, after all, just before the Beatles.

Reding this was all the more enjoyable as I was in Leeds for my birthday weekend while reading about the tales of rural Yorkshire. Much like Evie, I’m very happy spending a chunk of my special day with my nose in a book.

I love how we got to know all the characters, particularly Evie’s mum for which we dipped back into the mid-40s every now and again. It was great to see a thoroughly modern Miss find her path while in rural Yorkshire.

The book's success is all the more surprising when learning the author is a middle-aged man, albeit one formally of rural Yorkshire. There’s an interview with the author at the back of the book as this book was selected for the Richard and Judy book club - my first read from that I think - which tells us there are two more books coming.

So it’s wonderful to be able to look forward to seeing what Evie is up to in 1972 and 1982.