The Trial of Lotta Rae: The unputdownable historical novel of 2022

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This review is written with thanks to Pigeonhole for the opportunity to read and review The Trial Of Lotta Rae. Just finished this beautifully written book and now sat with a headache from crying and all the thoughts I'm feeling now I'm finished. Mark Hodkinson affectionately documents Rochdale’s dire 1973/74 season – winning twice in 46 league games – with a team considered the worst to play in the Football League. But this book is as much a love letter to his hometown as to his hometown team. The subject seems niche but the writer stretches the story smartly. We are on the familiar terrain of strikes over pay and crippling inflation, troubled race-relations, irresponsible industrialists, and despicable politicians, like Rochadale’s Liberal MP, paedophile Cyril Smith. Hodkinson adds plenty of cultural colour too, and evokes what a game on a Saturday can mean to a town trudging through life’s grey travails. Through a story of inglorious losers on the pitch, he shows that ordinary, decent people will not be defeated off it. NJ McGARRIGLE It seems we imagine there will be a harbinger of those days that come to shatter our lives. Will herald their arrival not with duplicitous blue sky, but a clutch of foreboding clouds. That we will be granted a sign. But the day it happened dawned comforting in its simplicity: sunny, fresh and bright. “

The Trial of Lotta Rae (Audio Download): Siobhan MacGowan

The plot is nice but I found it quite weakly supported by historical facts except for the Suffregette movement with some historical figures that appear in the storyline. For the rest, it is pure fiction. I was curious in the end to see if the author would have explained it was loosely inspired by real facts but apparently is not. From my knowledge of the the history of crimes related to gender based violence and related trial, it sounds improbable that a woman from the working class in those years would have ever press charges against a rich man for rape. It would be nice to imagine it could have happened but, as a lawyer who has read and studied the first of such trials, the way dialogues are developed and Lotta's standing in the trial is how a much more modern woman would have approaches it. It sounds really unrealistic. This was quite disappointing for me. The devastation that follows one horrific night for Lotta is truly haunting and I feel like this book will be one I remember for a long time. It is a monumental work, not always easy to read, often harrowing in its descriptions of the brutal treatment meted out to hunger striking women and the horrors of trench warfare. But there are lighter moments, too, not least in the delightful episodes featuring Lotta's child. The Trial of Lotta Rae (Charlotte Rae) is a harrowing insight of the tremendous differences that existed in the early 1900’s between the honest, poor, hardworking people and the elite in society not only in monetary terms but justice and respect. At this time Emmeline Pankhurst and her suffragettes were fighting for the emancipation of women, marching through London in the hope that Prime Minister H H Asquith would sign a Bill giving women the right to vote.

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It is full of tragedy and injustice. Lotta Rae is an ordinary girl from an ordinary working family who is treated abominably by the justice system and loses so much of what she holds dear throughout her tormented life.

The Trial of Lotta Rae by Siobhan MacGowan - Fantastic Fiction The Trial of Lotta Rae by Siobhan MacGowan - Fantastic Fiction

Betrayed by her counsel, with far-reaching ramifications for her family, her life takes a turn for the worse ultimately resulting in the loss of both her parents and colouring her outlook on life and God.Siobhan MacGowan is a journalist and musician who lived and worked in London for much of her life before returning to Ireland several years ago. She is from a family of great storytellers, the most prominent of which is her brother, Shane MacGowan, of The Pogues. The brewery where respectable working-class Lotta (Charlotte) Rae and her beloved father earn their living always holds a party on Halloween night. During the gathering in 1909, Lotta is raped by a wealthy gentleman, an acquaintance of the owner. Her father is devastated and encourages her to press charges. The case comes to court where she is defended by an up-and-coming barrister, William Linden. She trusts him implicitly and so tells him absolutely everything about her life.