Duck Feet by Ely Percy

Duck Feet was a lovely, heart-warming novel with lots to like about it. It is set in the mid-noughties in Renfrew and Paisley, and follows Kirsty Campbell through a few school years of her life. It’s written in the local dialect (might take you a few pages to get into the flow!) and is a pretty accurate portrayal of life as a teenager with all of its joys, firsts and heartaches, as well as exploring the realities of working-class life. I felt sometimes this portrayal was just a touch too realistic at times, abandoning some of the potential of a novel, where you can reflect and experiment beyond everyday observances (there were a couple moments involving dreams which I marked down) but I think this is probably mostly reader preference on my part. I do think you would be hard pushed not to feel for the characters and feel moved by its bittersweet end. Though the ending did give me pause in some respects as to how well it fit with the rest of the novel. One of my more pressing problems with this book though is that it felt overlong. Again, this is probably a part of the realism element - in that it shows all that goes into a life - but I did find it to drag a bit, especially through the middle. Overall, I liked it and I think that it has lots of popular appeal, particularly for those of us who were in high school around this time. The nostalgia is real!