One thing after another - Broken Places by Wendy Perriam

The blurb of this book claims some people will love its central character, Eric, but also warns that some people will want to shake him for his passivity. Having read the thing, I suspect most people will chose option three: put the book down and never return to it because it lacks a compelling story.

So, Eric. An idealogical Librarian. Some things happen - he goes on a date, he sets up a prison book club, he expects his daughter to visit from the US.

Some other things happen - he eats soup, he rides a bike, he recounts his childhood.

Then some other things happen.

Then some other things than that happen.

Although well written if rather old fashioned in Eric's language - jarring because of his age - it never manages to recover from its own lack of direction. The final chapters in particular are poor, the dialogue stilted - it could have worked beautifully as a punchline, but it's played straight and is, for my taste, unbearably naff.

1.5 stars because it's well written and some of the chapters are good.

A four star read undermined by my knowledge of facts - The Stolen Girl by Renita D'Silva

[This book was provided to me gratis by the publisher, the lovely Bookouture, facilitated in this act of goodness by NetGalley. Thanks guys!]

Renita D'Silva is a name I know although not one which has been attached to the front of any of the books I've read. Her previous two novels, Monsoon Memories and The Forgotten Daughter, have both appeared on my Amazon recommended lists and if I had slightly less to read I would likely have tried one or the other by now. Instead, I was pleasingly approved for the ARC of her new novel, The Stolen Girl, which you will be able to part with your money for from the 12th September.

Despite the cover, The Stolen Girl of the story is 13-year-old Diya who one day has an argument with her mum, strops out, goes back for her coat and finds her mum being taken away by The Rozzers. According to the police, Diya isn't Diya, she's Rupa; and Vani isn't her mother, Vani is the woman who stole her as a baby. Diya's real mother, Aarti, is at a hotel nearby, waiting to take her daughter back to India.

The book follows these three characters, Diya, struggling to adjust to this new truth, Vani, writing letters to her daughter from prison, and Aarti, desperate to finally meet the child she's been searching for all its life. It also attends to Vani and Aarti's pasts, to their childhoods and to the truth about Vani's actions.

The trouble is, despite an introduction in which the author thanks various people for aiding her with research and which I'm confident she has done, it doesn't read like it. Although I'm a pedant, I don't mind minor changes to fact, especially when they improve the flow of the book - things like (as mentioned in the introduction as being incorrect) the number of visitors a prisoner can receive in a day: absolutely fine. However, The Stolen Girl is dependent on things happening in a way other than they would and that's a problem. A big one.

As this is an ARC I don't want to go anywhere near possible spoilers (although I'm happy to provide both mild spoiler and total spoiler explanations via PM/comments) so ...

You know that song by Natasha Beddingfield, These Words? You know the way you can't quite believe that nobody, at any point between the initial rehearsal right the way through to signing off the finished track said, 'Actually Natasha, it's pronounced Hy-per-bo-lee"?

That.

That is the level of error here - the kind of basic thing you'd imagine somebody, at some point between the author writing it and the file being sent to the printer, would have picked up on. Consider the incident in Ireland last October where the Garda removed two children from their Roma families because - thanks to some racial profiling - they believed they'd been abducted; or the case in Greece also at that time which had a different outcome.

Because of this, even when things are correct, I was painfully aware that there is "technically correct" and there is "realistically likely to happen". The Stolen Girl came down far too heavily on the side of the former without reference to the things I'm thinking of.

I also have some minor complaints about the book's own continuity - tiny details like Diya commenting she's already lost weight and her clothes are looser on her after only a few days, maybe a week.

It's frustrating because I did really like a lot of this book. I'm not the biggest reader of women's fiction but I really engaged with this one - my mark of a four star read is that I'm eager to get back to reading it to find out what happens and this, despite those errors, did that. Vani and Aarti's story in particular, while veering a little close to soap-opera plotting for my taste - I liked. It's difficult to write characters who act as these do while keeping them believable, but D'Silva does a good job with the emotional side of the story.

I can't personally recommend this one, but I will emphasise that if you don't care about things being realistic, and/or you have no idea happens when you commit a crime, you probably shouldn't let this review put you off. Read the Kindle sample and if you don't spot any problems you'll likely be fine. There is a lot to like.

However, for me, the problems matter. I'm struggling to decide if this book is actively terrible or just not very good. I want to mark this higher because I did enjoy reading it, but I have to show fidelity to my other reviews. With regret, 1.5 stars.

This book is probably better than I think it is - Heartland by Anthony Cartwright

As of today, I have 59 60 (The QI Book of the Dead was the Daily Deal) books in the "Purchased to Read" folder of my Kindle. Thanks to Amazon's dastardly policy of price matching, this number is rapidly shooting higher due to Sainsburys doing an ebooks for 99p yoke throughout October. The problem continues due to my having a rather decent local library which insists on supplying me with a variety of interesting books every time I visit. Plus I've got a hardback copy of Bring Up The Bodies giving me an accusatory glare but it's been doing that since the September before last so I've got good defences worked out.

In the interests of trying to not feel as though I've wasted whole pennies on stuff, I'm making the attempt to get through some of the stuff riiiiiight at the back of the folder which I barely remember buying and am not entirely sure why I did.

Heartland I do remember buying, and why.

Reason the first: it's set in Dudley and while I'm Welsh, I'm also half Birmingham. Dudley is not Birmingham, but they're close enough. Plus I know an Enoch and Eli joke about Dudley.
Reason the second: it's from Tindal Street Press. I pay attention to the publisher when I buy a book, especially the small independents (which TSP probably still was when I bought this), and I've read some good ones from them. Deborah Morgan's Disappearing Home and Catherine O'Flynn's What Was Lost (srsly, ignore the cover) to name two.

However, it's not a book for me, and I should emphasise that one and a half star is a purely personal opinion. If you're not me, you may well like this a lot.


It's slow, and I'm not sure if it's slow because it's setting everything up (a la Case Histories by Kate Atkinson), or whether it's slow because it's one of these books which wanders through the narratives of the various characters with no particular impetus to get anywhere. I do like those kinds of books, but my enjoyment is dependent on having good writing and compelling characters, and Heartland only manages the first of those.

I freely admit I am rubbish at keeping characters straight. If Game Of Thrones the TV series didn't have such fantastic art direction, I would have given up after an episode or two. Heartland, for me, just doesn't give enough distinction to the characters for me to be able to tell them apart. This is made more difficult because the narrative covers the same characters at different points in their life - you have Rob watching England vs Argentina in the pub, Rob playing a game of football as part of a local team, Rob being a teaching assistant - all only divided by paragraph breaks. It says a lot for the writing that those transitions were never confusing, it was my inability to tell the difference between Rob and Jim, let alone remember who Jim was, which drove me to give up.

Then there is the football. I remember England's match with Argentina, but I'm not wild about reading a play-by-play breakdown of it interspersed with conversation. Or about any of the other football matches featured. Write me a book about rugby and we'll talk.

If I didn't have so much else to read, I probably would have stuck with it a bit longer. I got to page 100, and the first 40 or so of those were a real struggle. It did begin to pique my interest a bit but ultimately not quite enough, so I'm going to give it one and a half stars.