A Slipping Down Life - Anne Tyler

61%

01.05.26

This Tyler is so early that the distinctive small-town 1960s setting was contemporary. It's stranger and sadder than her later work - and it's not set in Baltimore! - but it's as intriguing and beautifully captured as ever. 

What Happened That Summer - Laura Pearson

43%

15.04.26

I didn't hate this but it didn't work for me. The podcast-transcript format can work well but here it seemed like a gimmick instead of the standard third-person narrative it should have been. Factual errors spoilt the immersion (when it is 9am in the UK, it is not, and never has been, 5pm in LA). The '90s setting was not convincing. The romance was hard to take seriously. The 'twist' was obvious from early on but was still never properly explained. All these things, as I say too often, could have been solved with a proper edit.

Mary Jane - Jessica Anya Blau

67%

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.

Stars Collide - Rachel Lacey

60%

29.01.25

Objectively, this isn't a particularly good novel but it's so sweet and positive that it's easy to overlook the general lack of drama and conflict, and the unrelentingly 'nice' characters. It's also refreshing to note that it barely features any men - the girls are definitely able to do it by themselves!

Utopia Avenue - David Mitchell

 43%

03.07.23

I'm not sure why I persevered with all 561 pages of this when many more tempting books are literally piling up. For a story about a trendy band enjoying all the subversive aspects of the exciting 1960s, it was incredibly dull. Mitchell can't write convincingly about music - or fame - or women - or mental health issues - and I really dislike fictional characters meeting real people (most of whom are now dead, presumably included to avoid lawsuits). Daisy Jones and the Six was better  - hell, even Songs in Ursa Major was better - and the 'other' David Mitchell is more fun.

Songs in Ursa Major - Emma Brodie

 45%

26.02.23

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.)

The Choir - Joanna Trollope

 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. 

Daisy Jones and The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid

64%
03.06.20

I've often thought 'Deepen Meaningful' would be a good name for a band. Not this band, though - much hyped but there's little profound about the sex 'n' drugs 'n' rock 'n' roll rows, and that's not helped by the ingenious, appropriate yet distancing interview-style narrative. But it still enters pretty high in the charts for simply being such a fun, escapist ride.
Soon to be televised, I believe - that could be interesting.

Just For One Day - Louise Wener

55%
16.05.20

I imagine the target market of Britpop fans is quite specific, but it includes me. I saw Sleeper perform two or maybe three times in the mid-90s so it's fun to go behind the scenes in this memoir. But it's not as enlightening as I hoped. There was a little gossip (probably within legal boundaries) but I'd have liked to know more about the mechanics of writing a song or making a video or planning a tour.

The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton - Anstey Harris

43%
16.01.20

If you want to annoy a copy editor (like me), assert in the very first sentence of your novel that putting an apostrophe before the word cello is correct and then use that distracting and archaic form throughout the book. Why not add to the irritation by throwing in a load of continuity errors and failing to fact check? And, if you want to annoy any reader, have a breathtakingly unsympathetic self-absorbed yet (oddly) not self-aware 'heroine' pining after a clearly useless lover for 250 pages. A triumph indeed.

How to Build a Girl - Caitlin Moran

51%
21.07.19

Being the same age as the narrator, a '90s indie-kid and a long-time fan of Caitlin Moran, I'm basically the target audience for this (officially not but clearly very) semi-autobiographical novel. So imagine my disappointment to discover that it isn't actually very good. Goes to show that pithy journalism doesn't automatically translate into witty fiction, emotional connection and three-dimensional characters.

The Music Shop - Rachel Joyce

56%
10.06.18

Unlike Joyce's other books, this is sad but not tragic, and [spoiler] even has a happy, cheesy ending, which is unexpected from this author. It's also so slow, with such tedious characters, that I nearly gave up several times. Well-written, of course, but unremarkable.

The Chimes - Anna Smaill

49%
06.07.16

Reading a book about how music sounds is never going to quite work. Reading a retro-futuristic dystopian book about how types of music that don't exist sound is never going to work at all. Hampering characters with no memories is also going to make rounding them out a tad challenging. All in all, this reads more like an undeveloped first draft - or a heavily cut draft of a much longer book.

Coconut Unlimited - Nikesh Shukla

48%

13.02.11

My husband bought me this for Christmas, being concerned for my psychological welfare because of all the miserable books I read. So on the plus side, this is upbeat and unchallenging, evocative of a particular time, place and culture. It's hard to overlook its lack of a plot, vague characterisation, semi-autobiographical self-obsession and awkward structure, but at least nobody dies.

Cider With Roadies - Stuart Maconie

58%
30.03.04




Stuart Maconie is a funny, eloquent and interesting guy. He even signed this copy of his book to four of us. Unfortunately, these memoirs are just rather bland - there's no real gossip and no real insights. And the copy editing seems non-existent - typos and repetition everywhere, to a distracting degree. Disappointing, apart from the inspired title.

Twelve Bar Blues - Patrick Neate

60%
07.11.02




It's difficult to describe the sound of music. It's difficult to describe a time and a place long gone. It's difficult to weave together several apparently disparate narratives into a single storyline - or harmony, as is attempted here. It's a brave attempt, and some parts are interesting and melodic - but on the whole it all seems a little out of tune.