Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes'

LoveReading4Kids Says

A suitably brilliant companion to A Calamity of Mannerings, Joanna Nadin’s Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is an enormously pleasurable coming-of-age page-turner that swings with the thrills of 60s Soho as it follows a year in the life of Birdy — a fabulously-conjured character who’s impossible not to love.  

As a new decade dawns on New Year’s Eve 1959, Birdy (real name Margaret) dreams of literature-related romance and glamour (think Bonjour Tristesse). Unfortunately, reality is somewhat different: “Even my name – Margaret – is average (Princess Margaret notwithstanding, as she is a goddess amongst women). Why can I not be a Calypso? A Viola? A Genevieve?”  

While Cambridge University is on the cards for Birdy, she wants “a life more like the fictional ones I keep reading about and less like the actual one I seem destined for – the dull suburbs, the safety of university in a honey-bricked city, then back to the suburbs to marry a Clive or a Colin and waste said education by having children who will repeat the process all over again.” After resolving to say ‘yes’ to everything, she befriends Charlie, a runaway aristocratic actress who secures her lodgings and a job in a Soho bookshop.  

While Birdy’s Soho adventures are a blast, and often funny as they reveal the swell of 60s liberalism, the book also explores conservative constraints of the era. In Birdy’s words: “There are some things that even today, in 1960, no matter one’s background, are considered ill behaviour: being homosexual is one, falling pregnant out of wedlock another.”  

Also brilliant on the tricky liminality of being a young adult (“I am all for being grown up, but it’s such a shame we have to leave all the childish things behind”), Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes' is an absolute joy.

Reviewed by Joanne Owen
Joanne Owen is a writer, reviewer and workshop presenter whose lifelong love of books began when she was growing up in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
More reviews by Joanne Owen

About Birdy Arbuthnot's Year of 'Yes'

'I suspect that in Soho anything can happen and frequently does.'

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