46%
27.06.25Was this really by the same author as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow? I'd been looking for a light read but this was basically helium: sentimental slush, with improbable, two-dimensional characters, terrible pacing and constant metaphors about novels that weren't as cute or clever as they were evidently intended to be. I feel sticky and manipulated (but not enough to care enough to cry at the end, as I was clearly supposed to).
13.10.24
I was bewildered about the point of this book. As with The Rachel Incident, what's interesting about young adults behaving like teenagers? It was readable enough but not particularly well written - I often had to stop and reread passages to work out who was doing what and when. The perfect tense exists for a reason and that reason is clarity.
(This also belongs to a subset of contemporary books with a prejudice against people with no siblings. Usually, kids are quite happy to be only children and their parents are quite happy to have only one. It is not going to mess anyone up or make them somehow incomplete.)
46%
14.09.24The 1990s seems like yesterday but this book has aged like a fax machine. Was it really so toxic then - both literally (so much smoking!) and metaphorically (so much unremarked sexism, sizism, racism)? It's also interesting to note that popular books were badly written with two-dimensional characters even then.
46%
06.06.24
This was clearly semi-autobiographical, and took an unusual lens to important cultural issues that the author clearly feels passionate about. But worthiness doesn't make it a good novel. The poor writing undermined any emotional, political, psychological or spiritual points the author was trying to make. The main problem, of many, was the relentless telling not showing - pages and pages of exposition with very little to ground it, set the stakes or to make the reader engage with the narrator's predicament. Apparently, it has been edited but you wouldn't know it.
46%
'An absolute joy'? 'Laugh out loud'? 'Hilarious'? Only if you think an irritating narrator with unresolved trauma and possible neurodiversity dealing badly with more trauma is funny. I'm all for dark humour but this wasn't funny - or well paced or feminist or based on any sort of reality (owning a cat is not in itself quirky and weird). After a slow and laboured three-quarters, the ending was rushed, with the emphasis on all the wrong elements.
46%
46%
07.06.21
Perhaps the barely literate style choice of omitting conjunctions and pronouns at the start of run-on sentences was to distract attention from the incoherent story and forgettable characters. So it was no surprise that it ended as if some pages were missing.
