The Carer - Deborah Moggach

 59%

16.10.22

The beautiful cover is probably the most memorable thing about this story. Fluently written by an experienced author, yes, but... the characters were clearly supposed to be complex but they weren't, and certainly none of them were sympathetic - it was just more rich people drama. Admittedly, I didn't see the double twist coming but the rest of the book bent itself into unlikely knots trying to explain it - and the lack of introspection that followed from the apparently intelligent characters just didn't ring true.

Interestingly, I gave Tulip Fever, the only other Moggach novel I've read, the same score 19 years ago.

Exit - Belinda Bauer

67%

07.05.21

Unlike Rubbernecker, not particularly dark or deep, but just as deftly drawn, quirky and unpredictable, with the occasional skewering one-liner thrown in to light the reader's way. 

Three Things About Elsie - Joanna Cannon

52%
27.08.20

Three things about this novel:
1. The metaphors. Dear God, the metaphors. It was like a 464-page creative writing exercise.
2. The 'twist'. Oddly, it was both obvious from about halfway through, and also inconsistently handled.
3. The story. Lumpily structured and didn't really make sense.

Sweetland - Michael Crummey

65%
25.04.16

A strange, evocative book that begins as a story of a community and becomes a fable of individualism. The unusual writing style was well judged and appropriate, laying itself out slowly and able to support the increasing weirdness of the protagonist's experiences until the inevitable ambiguous ending.

[I liked this cover best despite the misspelling of the author's name!]

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All The Rules - Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

52%
08.07.15

I used to want to learn Swedish and maybe I still should because something was lost in translation here. The stilted prose drained away the humour and character development and made what could have been a quirky story really rather dull.