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Felicia's Journey
William Trevor. Penguin: 1994 (paperback). ISBN: 0140253602. 213 pages.
Guide not available
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William Trevor, whose taut and arresting short stories have so frequently graced the
pages of New Yorker in recent years, may be familiar to some of you. Any reader, however, New Yorker addict or not, would
do well to pick up this exquisite page-turning novel, a masterful literary thriller that will keep you guessing and hoping
till the final page. In the opening lines, we meet Felicia, Trevor's young Irish heroine, a disastrously naïve
seventeen-year-old girl. She is vomiting repeatedly in the public wash room of a ship bound for England, having gotten
herself into the oldest kind of trouble. She had some help getting herself into this kind of trouble, of course, and now
she is seeking her passionate hometown beau Johnny in his new adopted country, confident that together they will start a
new family infinitely more supportive and loving than the one she left behind in Ireland. The only problem is that
Felicia isn't exactly certain of Johnny's precise whereabouts. As Johnny proves harder and harder to find in the heavily
industrial English Midlands, Felicia comes to depend more and more on the help of her new friend, the infinitely
respectable Mr. Hilditch, a middle-aged catering manager. Little does Felicia know that Mr. Hilditch has enjoyed the
friendship of many a pretty, unsuspecting girl before she stumbled across his path. Trevor's penetrating psychological
portrayal of his two principals rapidly heats to a boiling point in such an unexpected manner that you hardly know what or
who to root for, making for the utmost reading satisfaction you are likely ever to find in 200 pages.
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