Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsA pleasant enough read - but also quite frustrating.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 20 September 2021
Rating: 2.3/5
This is my second experience of Fiona Valpy's work, having previously read "The Dressmaker's Gift". Overall, I think "The Storyteller of Casablanca" is a slightly better novel, but many of the frustrations that I felt while reading "The Dressmaker's Gift" were again evident in this book.
The story takes place across two timelines: Initially 2010 and then interspersed with flashbacks to 1941/42 via the medium of a young girl's diary. The narrative for the 2010 sections is provided by Zoe, an expat who has relocated to Casablanca with her husband. Hidden away in one of the bedrooms of her new home Zoe finds a diary written by Josie, a 12-year-old (initially) girl who lived in the same property with her family some 70 years earlier. As she reads through the diary Zoe is transported back to world that young Josie inhabited and the challenges that she faced.
Fiona Valpy does a creditable job of evoking the atmosphere of life in Morocco, both in the modern setting, but more especially in the wartime period. Josie's story is one that I found engaging. I was not always convinced that the voice given to her by the author was entirely authentic for a girl of her age, but I was prepared to overlook this on the grounds of artistic licence. I was less enthralled by Zoe's chapters. For the most part - certainly until much later in the novel - these contributed little to the overall development and detracted from the more compelling story of Josie, in a way that disrupted the emotional investment that was being made in the characters from that earlier time. Consequently, there are some potentially heartrending moments that don't achieve the level of impact they should have done. I made a similar observation in my review of "The Dressmaker's Gift". In that book I was also frustrated by the handling of the modern sections of the dual timeframe story and the diminishing effect they had on the impact of the novel as a whole. It is disappointing that the same trait is again evident in the author's work here.
On the whole, this is far from being a bad book, and it is a pleasant enough way to while away a few hours, but I felt it had the potential to be something much better.
