Circus of Wonders - Elizabeth MacNeal

 59%

17.06.24

Proper literary fiction, this - meticulously written*, carefully layered and a bit depressing. The settings were well researched and vividly described, as was the complex plight of those who were 'different' in Victorian times. But the characters never really came alive, and most of them were so passive that their actions didn't seem to be conscious decisions.

*Although perhaps the editor got distracted three-quarters of the way through, when endless comma splices and a general lack of gerunds became very distracting.

Shuggie Bain - Douglas Stuart

 

51%

08.04.21

I would never have chosen to read something so unrelentingly bleak but, hey, this won the Booker Prize, and was the first choice of my new reading group so sometimes the challenge is worthwhile. Not in this case. It was heavy in every sense: weighed down by endless, meaningless adjectives, metaphors and similes, by the interchangeable sex-and-power-hungry men, by the interchangeable weak-and-untrustworthy women, by its lack of nuance, by layer upon layer upon tedious layer of Bad Things Happening. A grim semi-autobiographical novel isn't automatically a good novel.