Pennington by KM Peyton

Pennington: A Trilogy by K.M. Peyton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I bought this primarily because of the hideous cover, dazzled as I was by this rendering of Patrick Pennington in a way I had never quite imagined him before. And for a long while it stayed unread and at the bottom of my TBR pile, occasionally beaming at me in all its awful glory without ever quite being read.

Of course, I knew the Pennington books and had read them all before in singular editions. In many senses, I was telling myself that I didn’t need to read this, that I knew the books, that I knew what KM Peyton could do. And that – perhaps – this cover, this brilliant monstrosity, was all I had this edition for. I knew the books well enough. I did not need to go back to them.

And then, I did. Weeks of lockdown and a slowly diminishing TBR pile, and this – the survivor – greeting me at the bottom of it. I hadn’t read anything properly for weeks; in a way, I was the pond-skimmer, an insect moving my way along the top of the water and never quite fully reaching that which lay below. I read, but I didn’t. I turned the pages, but I didn’t.

But it is for such moments that KM Peyton is made for. She is a writer who can find the elasticity of a moment, stretching it until everything that it could be and everything that it is has been explored. And although, perhaps of the three, Pennington’s Seventeenth Summer feels its age a little, this is a remarkable, brilliant collection of stories. It is life, it is love, and it is written with such a beautiful and eloquent fluency that I reread whole chunks of it in a slow stupor of wonder. Her eye for detail! The nuance of emotion! The way she can see everybody and allow them to simply be!

Oh the glory of a writer at the peak of her powers, the glory.

(Cover’s still awful though).

View all my reviews