I will start by saying that this book was a little out of my usual comfort zone. It took a while to get into the through of the story and when I was able to understand how it all linked together I enjoyed the historical elements, I have not read anything about the French Revolution before and the struggles that the Czech/Slovaks had with the Russians so this was interesting, but I didn't like the curve ball of being pushed into the future and to another planet, I feel that this spoilt the story. I loved how each storyline was pulled back to the chateau and the treasure that was hidden away in the well and how the generations were looking out for each other. I just wish the story had finished in the present not the future.

This is a fascinating story of Heloise, born as Halley’s comet passed the earth, and her daughter who inherits her mother’s memories. Then as generations the follow, each daughter inherits the memories of the women who came before her. Heloise’s story, and those of her ancestors are therefore told through memories. Both speculative and whimsical, this crosses the historical fiction and fantasy genres, allowing for a completely unique story. Spanning centuries, significant moments in history and even post-Brexit future, this novel will captivate with its superb characters, stories within stories and mysteries to be solved - and all in less than 300 pages. Genius.

Many thanks to John Ironmonger, W&N and NetGalley for allowing me an arc to read and review.

Born into a prosperous family on the night of the comet, Heloise marries well but the French Revolution sees her abused and beheaded. Her daughter Marianne is brought up in a convent but as she hits puberty she begins to have vivid dreams, the memories of her mother. This continues through each generation of daughters until Katya plans to find the family treasure, hidden from the revolution, the only problem is that she is behind the Iron Curtain.
It's really difficult to describe this book as it is part fantasy, part historical fiction and yet it becomes something deeply original and profound. The premise is that each female child is able to know details of the lives of her ancestors from the tragic Heloise onwards, this means they can understand multiple languages and have understanding beyond their scope. I found the historical sections excellent, Ironmonger definitely gets under the skin of Marianne but does not go into vicarious details regarding the imprisonment of Heloise. The only part I didn't really enjoy was the last couple of sections set in the future. I could just about cope with Halley and her tale set in the near future but the final section was just not my thing at all - I could see what the author was trying to say and I liked that but science fiction is most definitely not my thing!

I'll admit it - I was totally drawn in by the cover. I'm so glad it lived up to expectations! I really enjoyed this, and raced through it wanting to know what would happen. Such an intriguing premise, and strongly written. I wasn't too keen on the section focussing on Halley, but loved the earlier parts, and the last chapter. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to keep all the characters straight initially, but it was fine. I would definitely recommend this book.

A fascinating, engrossing and entertaining story that kept me hooked.
I loved the idea of memories passed to the descendants and how the books moves in time.
The historical backgrounds are vivid and interesting, the characters fleshed and the plot flows.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

I wanted to adore this book. Just from the description, my expectations were incredibly high - perhaps too high. The idea and premise is beautiful and magical, and that’s what I hoped to feel about the book as a whole. However I majorly struggled with it. I feel like we didn’t click, and I just couldn’t get on with it. I found the writing slightly confusing at times, and a lot of the story was really difficult to follow; many of the sentences felt ambiguous, and multiple reads wouldn’t bring clarity, so I was forced to move on somewhat blindly. It was also very historical (which admittedly I should have been expecting), which for some would be incredibly interesting and engaging, but instead stood in my way. I was imagining this would be a fairytale, and it didn’t feel like that.
All this said, I imagine for some readers this is a five star read, and it has simply fallen in the wrong lap. To each their own!

I found this book quite unique, characters well developed and written very well.
It was a bit slow at the start, but afterwards, it picked up and became gripping. I really enjoyed my time.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy.

The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild mainly tells the story of three women fighting their circumstances in three different times and places: Marianne Muse, an orphan raised by nuns in late eighteenth/early nineteenth century France who seeks revenge for the rape, torture and beheading of her aristocratic mother; Katya Němcová, a Czechoslovakian collective dairy farm worker who devises an unusual way to cross the Morava River to Austria and freedom in 1979; and historian Halley Hašek, who wishes to travel to France, but in order to do so must prove herself to be a compliant citizen in the dystopia that is Britain in 2061.

What binds them - and a number of other women whose stories we also dip into - is not only that they’re part of the same direct maternal line, but that they inherit the memories of their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and so on, right the way back to Marianne’s mother, Heloise Montbelliard. In their dreams, they remember places and events they haven’t personally experienced, both good and wake-up-screaming bad. They also know from their memories that Heloise’s husband, Jean Sebastien Montbelliard, hid the family’s many valuables somewhere secret when they fled their grand Dijon home.

This book succeeds both as an exciting historical novel and a work of speculative fiction - in some ways, it reminded me of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Marianne and Katya’s stories are very interesting, well-researched and described; I got a really clear and vivid sense of what it was like to live in France during the Revolution and Czechoslovakia in the Soviet period. I also loved the historical details that cropped up in the snapshots of the more minor characters - for example, Esme Schmidt, who lives in Vienna in the early twentieth century, is sent for psychoanalysis by her father on account of her dreams.

In fact, the different reactions the people around the women have to the dreams - some are suspicious and disbelieving, others are curious and interested - are fascinating in themselves and send the women’s lives down different tracks. Women with more sympathetic families and partners are more able to talk about them, visit the places involved, and seek the treasure, whereas their less fortunate counterparts try to downplay and ignore them.

Ironmonger’s description of Britain in 40 years’ time, meanwhile, is terrifyingly plausible. Halley is constantly subject to a pair of hectoring simulacrums - a personal assistant and a doctor - who can get her ‘compliance credits’ docked if she disobeys their directives to exercise or go to medical appointments, and report her if she breaks the law. It’s against the law to be rude to an AI. It’s also difficult to obtain a travel visa to Europe because so many Britons want to escape there from the environmental disasters that have made some areas of the country uninhabitable.

There are sad, brutal, tragic and shocking events throughout this book - particularly in revolutionary France - but there’s also loads of love, selflessness, happiness and humour, which act as a balm and make it especially readable.

While our heroines have their own distinct personalities and concerns, they’re all daring and resourceful, and I had my heart in my mouth sometimes because I so wanted them to succeed in their individual missions! The treasure hunt is a clever and exciting touch, as the author doesn’t make it at all easy and it gives the women a common goal among the red threads - another of which is Halley’s Comet - that run through their stories.

The only complaint I have about this book is that I wish it were longer - I’d have loved to have seen the stories of the women other than Marianne, Katya and Halley expanded so that they were just as rich, detailed and absorbing. It could have been an epic.

The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild is a wonderful, inventive adventure that takes the reader from late eighteenth-century France to mid twenty-first century Britain and beyond.

The premise of The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild is fascinating: We follow the lives of generations of a family of women whose memories are passed on from mother to daughter. The result is a mix of memories and recollections of historical events, social relationships and personal tragedies. Our main protagonist, the one who brings all strands together, is Katya living behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia with her father, and it is through her dreams that we live through centuries of European (and a bit of American) history: starting with Heloise, a French lady whose life is ended on the scaffold during the Revolution and following her long line of her female ancestors. 

The book is ambitious in its scope but Ironmonger, for most of the time, pulls it off wonderfully. Sometimes I would have wished for a bit more coherence as the story jumps back and forth in time - it occassionally seemed a little chaotic which, however, may have been a desired effect. It does go nicely with the confusions the protagonists experience during their rather eventful lives so maybe this was just me. I also loved the historical aspects of the novel with its glimpses into the past that often brought with them new perspectives on history as a concept as such. In particular, I chuckled throughout the post Brexit passages, wondering how much of a clairvoyant the author will turn out to be (after all, his Not Forgetting the Whale basically predicted our current pandemic). ;-) 

The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild thus ebbs and flows through time, introducing us to a number of quirky and believable characters and bringing these together into a greater narrative of a family through layer upon layer of new plotstrands. As with Ironmonger's other books, this is a unique story that will leave you discovering something new on every single page.

I really struggled to engage with the beginning of this book - it really is a slow burner and I didn't start to really enjoy it until a third of the way through. Perhaps the reason why I found it difficult to engage is that the story didn't seem to flow in the beginning.
Heloise was born whilst the Halley Comet exploded across the sky, meaning she was born with a gift that would be passed down to her future female descendants - all of the females inherited their female predecessor's memories.
The story shares memories both past and present and it is very unique and well written. The characters are believable and it deserve a second read.

Following his wonderfully life-affirming view of the apocalypse in the delightful Not Forgetting the Whale - a situation that we can much more readily identify with and a reassurance that is very much needed in these pandemic times - John Ironmonger returns to a similar theme of an individual with extraordinary memory abilities that was there in his first novel The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder. Here, in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild, it's not just a catalogue of all the experiences gathered over 20 years of a life, but a far more expansive look at life and experience gathered across several tumultuous centuries.

The experiences of eight lifetimes no less are all inherited by Katya Němcová, a young girl living on a farm in the Slovak mountains. It's a 'gift' that has been passed down from mother to daughter across several generations, the memories stretching back to a French noblewoman Heloise Montbelliard born in 1759 during an appearance of Halley's comet, who died during the French Revolution. Her memories - more like vividly real lived experiences - and the accumulated memories of each of her female line descendants have been passed down from mother to daughter, giving an expansive view of the changes and experiences of many women across the centuries, across many countries.

Rather than Heloise Starchild being a clever David Mitchell Cloud Atlas-like folding in and overlapping of stories, John Ironmonger appears to be much more interested in the line of history and human experience; extraordinary human experience living through troubled times and - as far as the women of Heloise Montbelliard's line are concerned - living under several oppressive regimes. It's a theme that is evident in some of the author's books but considering the greater scope of history, time is also very much a factor in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild. Time doesn't so much heal - at least not from Katya's perspective as she has all the pains of the past tied up in her - but it gives her a unique perspective to see things change over time. And over such long periods even great rivers can change course.

Essentially then this - and the somewhat clever narrative device of Heloise Montbeillard's hidden treasure waiting to be discovered - offers some measure of hope when otherwise The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild could otherwise be very bleak reading. The experiences recounted during the French Revolution and the terror of the guillotine, the Napoleonic wars, Nazi atrocities on Slovak villages, Russian tanks invading Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring, are all are lived through from Heloise to Katya's family line. How are we supposed to grasp and learn from the accumulated knowledge of these experiences? Are those events doomed to fall into the past, be erased and forgotten if we don't have the Gift to remember them?

Sometimes you have to experience hardship and difficulty in order to see and appreciate what is important, and you don't need the ability to live past lives in order to consider where we are today. Sometimes a little nudge or reminder is needed though and John Ironmonger's The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild does that beautifully, intelligently, sensitively and meaningfully, exploring the big questions in a meaningful and relatable way, helping us see the bigger picture even in the midst of a crisis. That's no small thing either.

Events in this book are rivers with historical, contemporary and speculative qualities flowing into a timeless, unbroken ocean, and each new chapter is the bridge that spans a turbulent past, the present day, and beyond.

The gist of the story is the patient, powerful and somewhat peculiar legacy that is inherited by the daughter of her matrilineal ancestors. It's a gift so vivid, so affecting, the child becomes a custodian of memories that feel as raw as if they were experiencing them first hand.

“Heloise Starchild” could so easily be described as a forever-evolving portrait. By continually applying fresh and vibrant layers to the same canvass another unique perspective to an already characterful composition emerges, and the future is as infinite as it is fragile.

This is certainly not your average run-of-the-mill tale, as can be said for this author's other titles. But one thing you are always guaranteed is that you will embark on a curious journey where you will discover something exceptionally unexpected.

The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild by John Ironmonger is a memorable story with a wonderful premise. It tells the story of a long line of women, beginning with Heloise, whose memories are passed down genetically from mother to daughter, so that each generation has a vivid recollection of the lives of the women who came before them. Heloise is born the night that Halley's comet passes over the earth, and this comet seems to be an important fixture in several of the lives of her descendants. We learn more of Heolise's story through the dreams of her descendent Katya who lives with her father on a farm in Czechoslovakia but dreams of escaping to the West , and in Katya's story and memories we are taken from Revolutionary France through the Second World War to the fateful event of Prague Spring that cements her desire to flee. Not only does the book travel back in time, it also gives us a vision of the future, beginning with a post Brexit Britain and onwards to the speculative days of space exploration and colonisation. This may seem like a lot of material for a pretty short (less than 300 pg) book yet it never seems rushed or forced, the story ebbs and flows, taking the reader along for the ride.
I read and reviewed an ARC courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, all opinions are my own.

This is an interesting tale of a chain of mothers and daughters who inherit their forebears' memories. Having avenged the sins upon the ancestors I wondered where the book was going to go, and was thrilled that it took a new route. The information gleaned from the ancestors is used to right or bypass modern wrongs. I really enjoyed the last part of the book, in the future, although the brief reference to a world sweeping virus was a little too close to home!

A novel take on travel through time and space - most enjoyable.