Welcome friend! I have not been on tour with the amazing TheWriteReads group in a while so it is with much pleasure and nostalgia to be joining them today! Margot Shepherd’s debut novel, Never Closer: A Novel About a Diary That Opens a Door On the Past is a thought-provoking read that fans of historical fiction would love. Here is what it is about.
Margot Shepherd | Goodreads
On an ordinary day in 2017, Jo receives a phone call about her 18-year-old daughter, Jessie. It is the call that every parent dreads. In 1940, 17-year-old Alice ties on her facemask and enters a laboratory to harvest a potential new miracle drug called penicillin. The lives of these women become entwined when Jo finds Alice’s diary in a vintage handbag. Past and present overlap and merge as life-changing events resonate for them all across the gulf of time.
This is a story about a diary opening a door on the past, chronicling a young woman’s determination to succeed against all odds, while unknowingly inspiring others to step into a better life. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, the infancy of antibiotics and a modern medical emergency and its consequences, it not only reminds us how fortunate we are to live now, but also serves as a stark warning about the fragility of life and the dangers of complacency.
Content notes include grief, depression, gaslighting, emotional abuse, medical content.
Never Closer – Book Review
I have been chronicling my life for almost ten years now and I love finding stories where diary entries in a journal are a source of reflection and consolation to someone many years later. Never Closer beautifully explores the strength that someone else’s written words can give to us.
The Plot
In the 2017 timeline, Jo has recently lost her mother. But life doesn’t give her the time to grieve. Instead, her younger daughter, Jessie, ends up at the hospital with meningitis and for several days, the prognosis looks grim. Through timely treatment, Jessie recovers but she is not the same. Not long ago, she had moved out for higher education but instead has to return home and take a year off to recover. For Jo, the empty nest is no longer empty and all her attention now goes to Jessie, helping her get back her strength and confidence in living again.
Through these tough times, a diary written in the 1940s by a young girl comes into Jo’s possession through her friend, Zoe. Alice lives with her mother and brother. Her father is fighting in the war. She writes about her everyday life, the conflicts with her family, correspondence with her father, her ambitions and dreams. Jo and Jessie often read the dairy together.
The Characters
Never Closer is told from the perspective of Alice and Jo, as they navigate their individual situations. Though not yet eighteen, Alice contributes to the family income by working as a technician at a medical centre where the doctors are working to extract pencilium from the plant. Since Jo and Jessie often discuss the diary, I enjoyed reading their thoughts and comparing with my own. I loved Alice. She is a young girl making the best of her circumstances while wanting to make an impact on the world. She is curious and intelligent. But inspite of that, she does not have a perfect life. She is living in war times and is worried for her father. Her relationship is quite stained with her mother and she often feels distant from her brother and reminisces how close they used to be.
The early chapters of the book set the ground for Jo as an attentive mom who wants the best for her children. As the story progressed, I got to know how she came to marry Rob and the dreams that she left behind. Alice’s line of work rekindles her interest in chemistry and with encouragement from Zoe, she starts to explore what the next phase in her career would look like. I enjoyed Zoe and was thankful that Jo had someone in her corner. I learned a lot about Jessie too through Jo’s point of view and it was lovely to see the strength she gained from Alice and how she was encouraging over Jo as well.
Many of the places and things that Alice mentions still exist and Jo and Jessie would bond over them. It is amazing to think how a young person can inspire older people, years in between.
The storytelling did a good job of depicting the distance between Jo and Rob. Beyond the first time they met, none of the interactions between the two were positive and I couldn’t quite understand what Jo liked about it or what made her stay. But at the same time, they would have married in the 1990s and societal values and circumstances can have a lot to do with long term decisions.
The Themes
Two themes that stood out to me through Never Closer were grief and existential crisis. Jo, Jessie and Alice, as well as some other characters, experienced these in their own regard. For Jo, it was sadness at losing her mother as well as fear for almost losing her child. Seeing herself outside of the roles of mother and wife was a journey for her. For Jessie, the world was a scarier place after the trip to the hospital. It took a lot of strength and work to be interested in old things again. For Alice, finding her path through the incertain wartime without support from her family was a tough call.
The Historical Aspect
Never Closer gives a glimpse into the little known history around penicillin. I knew of Alexander Fleming having discovered it but I didn’t know anything about the events that led to its introduction into mainstream medicine. Here is some additional history from American Chemical Society International Historic Chemical Landmarks. Discovery and Development of Penicillin.
“It was Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their colleagues at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University who turned penicillin from a laboratory curiosity into a life-saving drug. Their work on the purification and chemistry of penicillin began in earnest in 1939, just when wartime conditions were beginning to make research especially difficult. To carry out a program of animal experiments and clinical trials the team needed to process up to 500 liters a week of mold filtrate. They began growing it in a strange array of culture vessels such as baths, bedpans, milk churns and food tins. Later, a customized fermentation vessel was designed for ease of removing and, to save space, renewing the broth beneath the surface of the mold. A team of “penicillin girls” was employed, at £2 a week, to inoculate and generally look after the fermentation. In effect, the Oxford laboratory was being turned into a penicillin factory.”
American Chemical Society International Historic Chemical Landmarks. Discovery and Development of Penicillin. Website. (accessed May 9, 2024).
I loved how Margot Shepherd used these historical details to ground Alice’s timeline.
Never Closer brings three women together in a poignant way and tugged at my heart strings. I enjoyed this book and would read more by the author. Check it out on Goodreads.
Tell me in the comments if you have already read it.
Many thanks to The WriteReads for giving me a chance to highlight this book on my blog in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for reading my thoughts. 🙂
Check out other reviewers on the tour:
Check out other historical fiction reviews and book excerpts.
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