28.07.26
It's set in 1976, you know. 1976! Yes, 1976! Can you tell? Can you tell? Are there enough irrelevant pop culture details and political references and endless updates on the heatwave (which actually sounds quite mild compared with 2026's brutal summer) to hint at it being, you'd never guess, 1976? And let's add so much background description that readers might not notice the flimsy, predictable plot.
05.10.25
This was such a lovely story: pleasing turns of phrase, funny in the right places, sweet without being cloying yet secretly quite complex - and surprisingly wholesome, given the sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll at its heart.
08.05.24
It's a short story, really, so I won't give it a grade, but TJR's work is always entertaining. I mean, it's no Clarissa (what is?) but the epistolary structure worked well in the context and had a few intriguing twists (spoiler: the evidence of the affair was not the letters). But was it really set in the mid-1970s? More like the 1950s - that cultural part didn't ring true.
45%
This was comically badly written in many - too many - places. 'Daisy Jones and the Six' it was not, whatever the copy-cat cover suggests. It was, admittedly, entertaining but, from the terrible metaphors to the trite song lyrics to the awkwardly inserted (sorry) sex scenes to the tiresome main character who can play any instrument just by looking at it, this novel needed several more drafts to be any good.
(Oh, I must add that the reference to a British rock singer's 'Kentish voice' made me laugh out loud whenever it was mentioned. I'm British and have no idea what that might sound like, so I'm pretty sure someone who grew up on an isolated US island 60 years ago wouldn't either.)
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.
09.10.22
Life on a lighthouse was dull and repetitive and a little dreamlike, just like this book. It was too lavishly descriptive for my taste, the characters too cold and similar, the magic realism and metaphorical flights of fancy too heavy handed. More 'hardgoing' than the 'gripping' and 'riveting' asserted on the cover.
55%
31.10.21
This was Booker longlisted but I'm not sure why. It's like a slightly more complex (and rather more Canadian) Anne Tyler novel without as much charm and humour. Why 1972? Why certain characters? Why those particular narrative choices? It's fine but ultimately unmemorable.
08.08.21
This early Tyler starts out promisingly with her trademark 'short story' opening chapter but it soon gets weird and inexplicable. Disappointing.
29.07.21
I'm all for relationship-based novels and beautifully written character studies - and this excelled at that - but I also expect something to actually happen in a story. There was no narrative tension to this at all, beyond 'bereaved man finds friend's diary, feels better' (spoiler!).
25.07.21
This was so awkwardly written that I had to check it wasn't self-published. So much exposition, so much cliché, so many unnecessary characters, so little of the editing it desperately needed to give it some sort of focus and depth. I didn't actively dislike it; it just wasn't very good.
27.06.21
This late Barbara Pym novel is as sharp and occasionally as funny as her earlier ones, but it's shot through with the poignancy not only of the regrets of old age but also of relentlessly changing times.
48%
09.08.20
This self-indulgent novel makes a huge metaphorical meal of an unsympathetic narrator (just for a change) and her boring friends going to university and then leading disappointing lives. I have rather less sympathy for the Boomers here than for the lost Millennials in Queenie, though neither set of characters is particularly likeable.
