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.
27.08.25
Hugely clichéd, hugely predictable and yet somehow hugely entertaining. I must like a folk horror that's leavened with humour - the light tone at times seemed to battle with the dark atmosphere but that's probably what made it so engaging, despite the uneven pacing.
(Interestingly, this very different but in some ways quite similar book is by the same author, particularly in terms of portraying the female experience.)
08.06.25
This was longlisted for The Women's Prize for Fiction but read like a collection of writing exercises that tried to cram in as many metaphors as possible about pathetic women, horrible men and depressing seaside towns. It started out pretentious and ended up trite, thus losing any insights into (some specific) female experiences.
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.
17.11.24
All the buckles were swashed in this well-written, well-researched feminist adventure. With its vivid historical and fantasy world building, interesting characterisation and enough humour to balance out the violence and grit, it makes other books seem rather lame. I mean, what's the point of a novel unless it stars a badass female pirate?
26.03.24
This really put the procedure into police procedural. The author clearly did his research and wanted us to know it. If only he had put the thrill into thriller as well. Still, the local (to me) setting added a little something and my town, which is usually ignored, even got a dishonourable mention.
This was just as ridiculous and inconsistent as other books I've read recently and yet I am much more willing to forgive its flaws. Why? I think because, unlike Cockleberry Bay or Lessons in Chemistry, it wasn't cynical. The characters were actually people you might want to spend time with, and the antagonists were not people at all - they were time and grief and the pressures of everyday life. It was very silly but also very engaging, and that's a win for me.
I heard the author being interviewed and was intrigued. Was this bestseller really as cynically dashed off as I suspected? Yes, of course it was. It's (very) poorly written, oddly paced, and has a completely unsympathetic heroine. In fact, all the characters were horrible, probably because most were stereotypes that literally made me cringe as I read. The descriptions of the gay and fat characters in particular were downright offensive. Even the endless stream of dogs was annoying. But kudos to May for finding a formula that works for her.
61%
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.
70%
This was extraordinary. Flawed and confusing but still, overall, extraordinary in a good way. Pulley's engaging writing style and the complex, well-researched plot unexpectedly combine to produce a refreshing take on that hoary old genre: time-travelling historical speculative fiction.
