56%
15.06.26It's not a bad book (it's in fact well written, well characterised, quite well plotted) but it's so unrelentingly depressing that I simply didn't want to read it. But, after many attempts, I forced my way to the end, but that was somehow even more depressing (spoiler! But this is Liz Nugent, after all: evidence #1; evidence #2).
43%
26.05.26This was... exuberant, with strong sense of place (Manchester) and time (the 1980s), although the pop culture references were rather shoehorned in. And that was the problem - a better edit would have sorted the awkwardness, poor pacing and repetition. In particular, characters rolled their eyes on almost every page, which must be as tiring for them as it is for the reader.
28.01.26
I could say exactly what I said about Back Trouble but this was slightly more memorable, with more vivid characters. I didn't like the anti-only-child rhetoric though!
54%
14.01.26This is lit fic at its most self-referential, like the crop circles it describes - carefully crafted and ultimately meaning whatever you want it to.
06.11.25
This inexplicably has an almost-perfect Amazon score but I found it dull, confusing and poorly structured. With updates like this, no longer Dracula won't die.
06.04.25
I liked the evocative descriptions of the British seaside, both in the 1980s and today. I didn't like the apparent lack of editing - the lumpy pacing, the continuity errors, the inconsistent characters, the obvious baddie, the wrongly attributed chapters, the sentences that made no sense. And it all got a bit silly at the end. The author needs to ask her publisher to work harder for her.
As you'd expect from the cover, this '80s-set thriller ramped up the gothic mystery factor before unapologetically going all out at the end. You could call it twisty but twisty does not necessarily a good book make - the last 10% or so was a case of "Really? Come on! Give the reader some agency!" Credit for the variety of female characters, though (all the male ones were pretty one dimensional), and for the quality of the writing - except for the irritating overuse of "atop" instead of "on".
06.01.23
I much preferred this to Chambers' later and more famous Small Pleasures. Not much happened, but what did happen happened engagingly and showed how a character-driven plot can still make a good story.
13.08.22
Garth Nix is a prolific and experienced (Australian) writer, so it's odd that this urban fantasy could have been so much better. The British characters all speak like Americans (but throw in uniquely British references to remind us that they aren't) and, despite explaining everything to each other at least three times, it's still not clear what's going on most of the time. The plot is a series of self-contained set-pieces that don't really hang together. It doesn't seem to have been proofread. Oh, and here's yet another book that is set 40 years ago purely to overcome plot points that would be made redundant by mobile phones and the internet.
17.07.22
Apparently, there's a subgenre called 'rich people dramas' and this is a prime example. I don't mind reading about impossibly entitled people - I mean, isn't imagining other's experiences what novels are for? - but this was just very boring. I was ready to give up when Something Suddenly Happened... and then it went back to being boring. We Were Liars was indulgent and predictable but at least it wasn't dull.
02.06.22
I was really looking forward to reading this but it turned out to be a struggle to finish. Why should I care about these rich, entitled people with their everyday problems? As well as the trend to set stories in the past just because people don't have cellphones, there seems to be a whole new genre about the relationship dynamics among four or more adult siblings, as if those of us from smaller families should be envious. Meh.
09.11.21
I last read this about 35 years ago (this is the cover I remember), probably when I was younger than Adrian and didn't understand why his problems were so funny. Perhaps because of its huge influence over (British) comic writing and young adult novels, the humour hasn't dated well, but in many ways teenagers never change.
08.04.21
I would never have chosen to read something so unrelentingly bleak but, hey, this won the Booker Prize, and was the first choice of my new reading group so sometimes the challenge is worthwhile. Not in this case. It was heavy in every sense: weighed down by endless, meaningless adjectives, metaphors and similes, by the interchangeable sex-and-power-hungry men, by the interchangeable weak-and-untrustworthy women, by its lack of nuance, by layer upon layer upon tedious layer of Bad Things Happening. A grim semi-autobiographical novel isn't automatically a good novel.
63%
20.11.20
This was my first J Trollope and actually it was quite good, in a rather dated, middle-class, tropes of little England sort of way.
