Dewithon 2024: Bring Me Sunshine by Lucy Kemp

'Order and self-regulation had saved her. Or at least she thought they had. The only guarantee she had now was a bowl of reheated pasta. Beyond that, she was no longer in the driving seat but a passenger of anxiety.'

There are times when every one of us looks for comfort in routine. Going home, making a pot of tea, re-reading a favourite book, listening to the music of our youth; all of these things can help us through difficult times.  But what happens when that need for routine becomes an obsession, a shield, a barrier between us and the exciting, exhilarating, terrifying unpredictability of life? Do we stay in our comfort zone, or do we put our toe back into that potentially shark-infested water? Do we listen to those voices - our own and other people's - telling us safe is better than sorry? Do we live, or simply exist?

Charlotte Bold is Charlie Traffic, Orbital Radio's collator of commuting news. Once upon a time she was the station's hotshot anchor DJ, but a terrible on-air incident has seen her relegated to the silent backroom - a place in which she's only too willing to hide. She clings to order and routine. Her lunch is always a Boots meal deal, her tea spaghetti bolognaise,

'she didn't want the plans to change, she didn't want life to happen to her. She wanted things to stay the same, to remain in control. Spontaneity was the enemy.'

So when her boss calls her in for The Talk, and tells her she has a choice - either go back to live on-air broadcasting, accept a job at an ailing local radio station on the Welsh coast or take redundancy, she almost falls apart. 

But not quite. Instead, encouraged by her oh-so-sympathetic DJ boyfriend Jonny, she takes the train from Paddington to Swansea. Jonny understands that she'll never be strong enough to face the microphone again. 

'He had agreed emphatically that she had to go to Wales - a blank CV would ruin her chances of ever coming back to London.'

Because that's her plan - to work for Sunshine Radio for as short a time as possible, just until she finds another job back in the big city. Isn't Jonny just the best? 

'Once this blip was over they could plan their future of homemade toasted granola and weekend walks in the park.'

When Charlie turns up in Mumbles for her first day at work, she bumps - literally - into the station's Health and Safety officer, Delme Noble. 

And no Delme is not a knight in shining armour. He's overweight, has an on-off girlfriend, drinks too much, has his own demons, and is utterly hopeless at his job. 

Worse is to come - Charlie soon discovers that her new job is not, as she had thought, another backroom admin one. She's expected to take over the station's evening slot and turn it into a 'don't miss' programme. The last incumbent was nicknamed DJ Death. Because that's what this job does to people's careers. It kills them. 

From the cover of Laura Kemp's Bring Me Sunshine you could be forgiven for thinking this will be yet another 'heartbroken girl reluctantly returns to small town where she's handily inherited her granny's failing cafe/bookshop/bakery...and in the space of one glorious summer she's not only turned the business around, she's ingratiated herself with all the locals (who had never even thought of reading a book, having a coffee or buying a cake before she turned up - for lo! she can suddenly bake better than Mary Berry, and make displays more enticing than Waterstones' window) but found herself living next to her very own dish of the day, who's not only drop-dead gorgeous, but also rich/kind/helpful/funny and by some inexplicable miracle also single and just waiting for her to fall into his arms. He usually has a spaniel. Sometimes also an adorable child who just longs for a new Mummy. 

Well forget all that nonsense. Bring me Sunshine is nothing like that. Instead it's the story of Charlie's struggle to regain her confidence, her all too recognisable determination to excuse the faults of someone who's only interested in himself, and her gradual realisation that, while everyone has problems, most of them also have hearts. 

Addressing themes of gaslighting, guilt, infidelity, grief and loneliness, and doing this within a story that's still both interesting and funny is some skill. Kemp achieves this by creating well rounded, nuanced characters in which we can see ourselves. Best of all, she does not fall into the trap of writing Charlie as Victim, who can only be rescued by an implausibly perfect love interest; instead Charlie has to find her own way through, with the help of the friends she makes at work and at home. It isn't easy and there are plenty of setbacks along the way, but she gradually rediscovers her own inner strength and engages with life once more. 

The supporting characters in Bring Me Sunshine are all very well drawn - no cardboard cut outs here. Tina, the station's super-efficient receptionist, used to live in palatial splendour in the smartest part of Cardiff. Now home is a grotty bedsit in Townhill, Swansea and Tina buys her clothes from charity shops. Her husband is, she says, 'away' - but what she doesn't tell them is that Gareth is in prison. And it's not only her work colleagues she's lying to; Gareth insists she also keeps the truth from their student daughter Darcy. But whatever happens, Tina will stand by her man. She loves him unconditionally, and although she accepts that he has done wrong, she's sure he didn't mean to. Soon they'll be back together, rebuilding their lives. Or will they? 

Kemp conveys Tina's anguish and anxiety so well. She's terrified of putting a foot wrong, and equally terrified that something will happen to delay Gareth's release. She can talk to nobody, she must maintain the façade. The strain is palpable, but like Charlie, Tina survives what life throws at her by finding strength she didn't know she had, and opening up to good people.

Claudia, Charlie's landlady's daughter, is strikingly beautiful and designs silk lingerie for a living, but she has no luck in relationships. No one can understand why...until events take a surprising turn. Again Kemp creates an engaging and interesting character, far from the standard blond bombshell that all lesser women love to hate.

And then there's Delme. Delme wants to do well, he wants to make people happy, but he so often messes things up. He wasn't always a fat slob either, but now he's so broken by grief and guilt that he feels the need to put himself last. Delme is a wonderful creation, a messed up man with a big heart and best of all, one that doesn't play on any of this to get a girl into bed. So another trope is avoided; he neither expects, not initially gets, Charlie's sympathy. Instead he tries to help her - and in fact he does, though his first attempt does her considerably more favours than it does him. 

Charlie starts to enjoy her new job, but she's also still in love with Jonny. Or is she just in love with the idea of love? As this little creep continues to toy with her emotions, she finds herself having to make more and more excuses for him in order to hang on to her dream. It's only when she finds out something so awful that even she can't ignore it that everything starts to fall into place. And again Kemp sensibly subverts our expectations; Charlie doesn't just fall out of one man's arms into another's, instead she finds her own inner resources, resources she always had, but had been persuaded no longer existed, to get to grips with life and make her own decisions.

I do have a few minor gripes with this book. There were so many references to people's eyebrows as a form of expression that I started to stick post-its on the numerous pages where they appeared. Very occasionally sentences did not make sense, a problem that I feel an editor should have noticed, and there were a few rather lazy metaphors - 'her incredible cat-like eyes', and jarring descriptions - 'His eyes were bursting but then his face dropped.', 'Her eyes fell to her lap.' I also have a small issue with the use of 'fit' as the past tense of 'fits' - 'But she fit right in.' Is this an Americanism or just bad grammar? I tried it out on a few people, young and older, and no one thought it sounded right. 

But these are small quibbles, because I enjoyed Bring Me Sunshine so much more than I do most such novels. Unlike them, it has characters with real grit and gumption; things do not fall into their laps, they win through because they deserve to.

Bring Me Sunshine does have some happy endings, and whilst I enjoyed these for what they were, I enjoyed them all the more because every character who finds happiness does so as much through empowerment as romance. And now I definitely want to visit Mumbles.

Bring Me Sunshine by Laura Kemp is published by Orion. I borrowed my copy from Aberdeen City Libraries.

Mumbles - image: Visit Mid Wales