Daily Telegraph Lucky Bunny review

Jill Dawson is a novelist and poet wonderfully unbound by the historical settings of her work. Her last book, The Great Lover, created an exquisitely fictional portrait of a real person, Rupert Brooke. In her new and gloriously enjoyable novel she invents a character so convincing that it’s hard to believe Queenie Dove is only a figment of the author’s imagination.

The setting is London’s East End, where Queenie is born into grimy poverty in the Thirties in a tenement near the Blackwall Tunnel. Her mother is an alcoholic, her father a career criminal. But Queenie is an invention all of her own. She knows, almost from birth, her own worth, fired with a fierce intelligence that will free her – albeit in an illegitimate manner. Her first criminal act is to steal a bottle of milk for herself and her brother. The theft is liberating, and it teaches her a lesson: “Saying nothing. My best talent.”
Caught up in the greater tragedies of war, young Queenie loses hold of her beloved grandmother’s hand in the infamous Bethnal Green Tube disaster, when 173 people were crushed to death. Effectively orphaned, she’s adopted by a gang of upgraded tarts, “the Green Bottles”, who teach her how to “hoist”. The East End girl becomes a West End shoplifter, stuffing silk stockings into her pants. Inevitably, she’s drawn into the organised crime of the Fifties, an alternative, illicit existence.

Dawson’s eye for period detail is unerring, as Queenie flits glamorously through Mayfair nightclubs and Hackney council estates alike, with namechecks for the Dockers, Diana Dors and the Krays. The Soho Italian Tony becomes her lover, while her autistic brother turns out gay – “he licks the stamps on the other side”. Landing in Holloway, she promptly escapes via the cell window in a magistrate’s court.

Nothing will confine our heroine, neither the violence of her boyfriend nor the law itself. She bursts out of these pages, longing for life, as we are drawn into her world by Dawson’s terse, electric prose. I’ve seldom read a novel with such a sense of excitement. And the fact that we find ourselves rooting for the wonderfully wicked Queenie through all her uproarious and emotional capers only underlines the subtle and affirming art of her talented creator.

Lucky Bunny - Jill Dawson's latest novel

'Her new novel, and new narrator, may be her most likable yet.'
The Guardian

Queenie Dove is a self-proclaimed 'genius' when it comes to thieving and survival. In Lucky Bunny she narrates her colourful life: born into a criminal family in the East End of London during the Depression, Queenie survives the Blitz and the Bethnal Green tube disaster to become an accomplished thief, trained by a group of women shop-lifters before moving on to more glamorous – and lucrative – crimes. Daring, clever and sexy, Queenie takes pride in outwitting the police and surviving on her wits. Despite attempting to go straight after the birth of her daughter, she’s tempted by the opportunity to take part in one last, audacious robbery.

Was she a woman more sinned against than sinning? Or wicked through and through? In the spirit of Moll Flanders, Lucky Bunny tells a vivacious tale of trickery and adventure, but one which has a darker undertow of pain and heartbreak than its heroine cares to admit. Yes, luck often favoured her, but that is only part of the story.

'Jill Dawson is one of those writers so gifted and assured you relax just five words in. Take me anywhere you like, you say to the book. I’m in your hands.
Where Jill takes you here is down the old East End, through a horrid World War II childhood, a spell in jail and then the glamorous, but seedy underworld of the Fifties.
Admittedly, it doesn’t sound so lucky and heroine Queenie is no angel. But she’s resourceful, funny, brave and beautiful.
You’re on her side from that fifth word in I mentioned.'
Wendy Holden - The Daily Mail

'Jill Dawson excels in literary ventriloquism, getting under the skin of a character and telling us their story, seemingly in their own words. Like all people who love to talk about themselves, her protagonists reveal much more than they realise. So it is with Queenie Dove, the narrator of this fast and wily adventure set in London's East End in the 1940s and beyond. The novel seems, at first, like the triumphant and enjoyable self-aggrandising of a fast woman, a talented thief on the make, laughing in the face of machismo and misfortune. It becomes, in the end, a moving and sobering account of survival, sharply told and brilliantly researched.

'The self-christened Queenie is determined not to have her listeners feel sorry for her, but the circumstances of her life speak for themselves. She is a child of the slums, born to an alcoholic and irresponsible but charismatic father and a high-spirited but disadvantaged mother. Both parents, as well as Queenie and her younger brother Bobby, are in and out of jails, nuthouses, borstals, cells and halfway houses, existing in a shady world of criminal gangs, shoplifters, vice, clubs, black-marketeers and scammers. It is a seedily glamorous existence where the thrills are cheap, the decor is tacky, the perfume's gone off and sex and violence are close (and closely linked) just beneath the surface.

'The events of the novel are related by Queenie with the brassy belligerence of a practiced confidence trickster. The period details are big, brash and bold: the Italian cafes, police raids on private clubs, new fashions, popular songs and criminal revelations seem glossed from newspaper reports and scandalised headlines. The era, like its characters, is revealed with broad brushstrokes that evoke the on-the-make excitement of Lucky Bunny's scrappy, big-talking personalities. Similarly, the action is fast and dramatic. There are heists and periods in the slammer, raids and thefts, screaming fights and rigged races.... but it is a testament to Dawson's skill that beneath the excitement there is always the ghost of the girl Queenie used to be, anxious, unloved, frightened, tough and determined to keep on going. Queenie sees herself as a success, but she is not. She sees herself as a liberated woman, but she is not. She sees herself as a main character, but she is not. She is a gangster's moll, a bit part player, a woman with resilience but little power. She is heartbreakingly proud of her skills as a thief; but she is not so skilled that she doesn't get caught. She is not an agent or a heroine, a leader or a mastermind.

'Despite its surface thrills and spills and Krays era glamour, Lucky Bunny is a novel of great concern, human sympathy and seriousness. It is a novel of ideas and society, disguised as a romp. It never forgets the person behind the lipsticked and audacious self-creation that is 'Queenie Dove', whose real name we never learn. It deals with the consequences of poverty, the effects of violence, the attraction and risk of criminality and the forging of character through necessity and deprivation. The novel ends with a stunningly depicted night time train robbery ...whose end result I won't reveal... but for all its grand scale and luridly attractive action, the reader comes away with a far subtler appreciation. In the end I understood and admired Queenie Dove - and admired Jill Dawson, too, for creating something so fine from such brutish elements.'
Bidisha's blog

'Heart-rippingly painful and joyously playful. A major prize-winning contender.'
Sainsbury's Magazine

'I'd imagine this year's Booker will be a shoo-in for Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child but as I haven't read it yet, I'm free to award my fantasy prize to Jill Dawson for Lucky Bunny. I adored the central character – a Mandy Rice-Davies confection with an even bigger heart – and have never come across an act of literary ventriloquism like it.'
Polly Samson, author of Perfect Lives

'In Dawson's capable hands, thieving Queenie's story is far more than just crime caper. An award winning poet, Dawson shrewdly uses her heroine's undeniably clever but poorly educated point of view to evocative and sometimes lyrical effect, the author's use of language pure, simple and shimmering. The bar of luxury soap Queenie nicked for her Nan whom she lost in the crush at the shelter remains in a "little dish on her kitchen windowsill and she must have used it now and then, because it had a pattern on it of popped bubbles, which looked like lace". And the reason why her mother gets locked away in a prison hospital is both gruesome and mysterious, in a incident with the narrator's baby sister relayed with the imperfect understanding of a scared and hungry girl that is the stuff of haunting prose.'
The Scotsman
read the full review here

'(Dawson) leaves us with some unforgettable images: some horrifying, like the wartime night when dozens of Londoners were crushed to death in the underground as they tried to flee German bombs, some beautiful, like the way Queenie's newborn baby's eyes change in days 'from inky blue to the blue of a mussel shell to a lighter, more astonishing colour, vivid as a thread of blue ice in snow'. Lucky Bunny is admirable, too, for the way its fizzing narrative is grounded in a cool-eyed awareness of the social and sexual injustices of the mid-20th century'
Maggie Gee, The Independent

'Jill Dawson does narrative voice like no one else.'
William Rycroft
read his onine review here
read his interview with Jill Dawson here

'We loved the fast-paced, conversational style that challenges the reader.'
MsLexia Book Group Review
Read the full review here

'Dawson, as ever, delves deep into her subject matter, combining fast-paced narrative with astute, piercing reflection on more complex matters.'
Independent on Sunday
Read the full review here

'Queenie Dove is an unforgettable heroine: once a child thief and now the most charming criminal London has to offer, she stalks the post-war city as if she owns it. Lucky Bunny is her story, and her adventures are as grimy as they are glamorous.'
Net-a-Porter Global Hotlist

‘This is Jill Dawson’s very, very best book. She is a wonderful ventriloquist. She does voice beautifully and you read it through in one great gulp of delight – at least I did. Another thing she is particularly good at is encapsulating emotional and psychological perception very deftly. Queenie thinks of herself as being lucky but what she really is is enduring, plucky, something of a survivor….hers is not the greatest of lives but it becomes a star turn.’
Lisa Appignanesi

‘I really began to enjoy it…..the relationship between poverty and organised crime is explored very well indeed. …(Dawson) shows how when you are literally starving - and I think it’s important that (Queenie) is literally starving at one point in the novel - your options are extremely limited. What she’s saying is there but for the grace of God go all of us. In the end a fairly textured idea of why people get engaged in crime.’
Misha Glenny, speaking on Saturday Review, BBC Radio Four

Listen to an interview with Jill Dawson about Lucky Bunny on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour here.