Sky City by Jacqueline Crooks review - an ambitious, lyrical portrait of trauma

The world of Sky City, Jacqueline Crooks's second novel, is a place where reality is subtly untethered from the everyday. The narrative floats just above the surface of a recognisable 1990s London, where a council estate is suspended above the city, and voices drift in and out through pirate radio. This world is one where trauma transforms the mundane into something uncanny. ## A Childhood Shattered by Trauma The novel follows the story of Jaycee, a child trapped in a west London housing estate known as the Cyborg House. Her stepfather subjects her to horrific sexual abuse, while her mother turns a blind eye, exercising her own brand of cruelty. Jaycee's childhood is marked by trauma, and she comes to believe that families are "dangerous places... like nests of poisonous spiders, huddled in dark, undisturbed corners, their venom, a single drop enough to rot the body inside out." Eventually, Jaycee is taken into care, where she finds an unlikely lifeline in Ella-G, another damaged girl whose exuberance masks wounds as profound as Jaycee's own. ## A Haunting and Polyphonic Meditation on Trauma As adults, Jaycee and Ella-G could hardly seem more different. Jaycee retreats into solitude in her high-rise council flat in Sky City, an estate perched above a shopping centre in north London, while Ella-G heads to the bright lights of New York's music scene. Through a conversation between past and present, Jaycee's childhood seeps into the contemporary narrative in shards of memory and recurring visions, her adult life continually interrupted by the child she once was. Crooks sketches this psychic dislocation with extraordinary imaginative force, drawing on her own experiences of trauma to create a deeply personal and powerful portrait of a person's struggle to rebuild a shattered self. ## A Novel of Ambition and Lyricism Crooks's prose is deeply musical, with sentences swelling and eddying in a dreamlike, rhythmic fashion. The novel's momentum can sag beneath the weight of its own poetic ambition, but the lyricism is also a key part of its power. The novel is unapologetically bleak, with a near constant effluvium of loneliness hanging over the narrative like the weather. It is a reminder that adversity can be an enduring condition, not a narrative device on the way to catharsis. Sky City is a novel that refuses to soften or redeem its trauma for the reader's comfort, instead presenting a haunting and polyphonic meditation on trauma and belonging that hovers between realism and dream.