Duck Feet, Ely Percy
“To read Duck Feet is to find a new best friend. It is impossible not to fall in love with Kirsty and her warm and witty Scots narration as goes through the trials and tribulations of teenage life.”
Duck Feet follows the lovable Kirsty Campbell as she goes from first to sixth year at Renfrew Grammar School in working-class Scotland. Told in short episodic chapters that perfectly encapsulate the fickle and fast changing focus of teenage life, Duck Feet explores the very best and worst things about growing up. From classroom banter and goldfish-like first kisses, to eating disorders, teen pregnancy, drugs and youth violence: with Kirsty we jump between the hard and the soft with such heartfelt honesty and humour.
To read Duck Feet is to find a new best friend. It is impossible not to fall in love with Kirsty and her warm and witty Scots narration as goes through the trials and tribulations of teenage life. It’s an opportunity to indulge in mid-noughties nostalgia and relive parts of your own school years through her. For those of us from working-class backgrounds, Kirsty’s experiences are particularly relatable and a much welcome breath of fresh air.
One of my favourite things about Duck Feet is its championing working-class lives. Percy’s novel is a love song to the best things a working-class background can give you – grit, wit, kindness, and drive. While it acknowledges the unfairness of underfunded towns and how much a postcode can determine opportunity, it is still very much a celebration of working-class culture and heart. In my opinion, not enough contemporary fiction does this and only turns to these characters and settings when in need of misery and poverty. This might make a good story, but it is not the full picture, nor truly reflective of these communities that have so much happiness, laughter and joy to star in fiction too.
When I spoke to Ely about this decision they said, “I think there are some really brilliant Scottish novels with working class protagonists – Jessie Kesson’s, The White Bird Passes, Jim Kelman's How Late It Was How Late, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting to name a few – and although I could relate to them on some levels, they didn’t really represent me or my family or the people that I was friends with when I was growing up.
“I didn’t always have the best time when I was at high school – I got bullied because I was a bit different – but no matter how rotten the bullies were, they were no match for the funny, kind and often totally ridiculous pals that I surrounded myself with; there was always someone with better banter and a hilarious story about what had happened to such and such during regi or at the weekend – and it was those stories that dominated my teenage years and kept me optimistic.”
This positively funny approach has certainly struck a chord with readers who have related to Kirsty in their swarms, quickly making the novel a runaway success. Since being published in March 2021 Duck Feet has gone on to be named overall winner at Scotland’s National Book Awards and ‘Scotland’s Book of the Year’ at the Saltire Society Awards. It has also provided Percy with more funding opportunities to focus on their third novel, Kingstreet, a Scottish crime novel featuring a trans masculine protagonist.
A queer, neurodivergent, Scottish writer from a working-class background, it is great to see Percy celebrated for their achievements and outstanding effort to make literature more inclusive and reflective of our world.
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