45%
26.12.25I can sort of see what Devlin was going for here - but it didn't really work. Trying to add nuances to perceived nepotism - and actual privilege is fine if we care about the characters. But everyone was either awful (the main character and her friends) or unrelatable (her aunt and mother) so the stakes would have been higher if they'd all tried to go into accountancy instead of the family business of acting.
21.09.25
I read this because the author went to the same college as me, and a sort-of unnamed version of it did feature - but it was nothing like my experience. She seems to have hated it as much as she hated her protagonist, who has so few redeeming features that I hoped she sank under the increasingly heavy pile of increasingly ridiculous Bad Things that happened to her. It was hardly the gritty realism I suspect it was intended to be.
(I didn't realise this was by the same author - it was both similar and quite different.)
17.09.25
I'm not much of a Greenwood fan but how could I resist a story set in my oft-ignored home town? Unfortunately, the town didn't feature at all and so the very occasional mention of local businesses - plus the use of the actual names of many racecourse staff - were the only high points in this poorly written and deadly boring (ha!) police procedural, where there were more police officers than suspects.
10.05.25
I don't mind an unsympathetic narrator if they're charismatic or intelligent or are at least interesting in some way but every single character in this story was horrible, boring and stupid so I didn't care what happened to them. Maybe that was the point, but when you hope the main character dies at the end for all her wrong choices, that's not a good sign.
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.
07.03.25
Yes, I know, but it was free and had a talking cat. Don't judge me.
Yes, I know. Not my normal fare but I thought it was funny that the hunky-minotaur-sex-worker-who-loves-his-family had the same name as my husband. I didn't dislike it but there wasn't much of a story or conflict - will their families accept their relationship? (Spoiler) Yes, straight away. There were hints of some intriguing world building that would have been interesting to explore. But I suppose people don't read this sort of book for its story...
I won't be watching the new Netflix adaptation if the protagonist is as spectacularly unlikable (has the author ever met a woman?) and the story is as muddled and boring as in the book.
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.)
