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.

Spare yourself - The White Devil by Justin Evans

I loved Justin Evans' A Good And Happy Child - loved it - so I was rather enthused to read this one. Sure, I wasn't too struck on the blurb, but that was true of his other book and that turned out to be great.

This one, not so much.

Part of it is not the fault of the book: I am hypersensitised to errors about Britain made by US authors. However, this was inadvertently hilarious.

We begin with a short and threatening prologue which fulfils the role of bad prologues everywhere: making up for the fact little happens in your first chapter. The White Devil opens proper with American student Andrew getting to grips with the oddity that is Harrow. We get parts of the welcome pack, the glossary - but don't worry if you're not paying attention, it doesn't actually make much difference.

Then, Andrew meets Matron, who is cross that he's an American. Later, he meets the other chaps in the 6th Form, all of whom are astounded to meet an American. They tell him to go f**k himself, he calls them assholes, they're all "Woah, mate, bit aggressive, what? That's how we greet each other in England!" Then there's a conversation in which Andrew doesn't know what a gap year is, or what A levels are. Later one of the English people will be completely confounded by the phrase "rain check" but that's okay because Andrew doesn't know what lager is.

Assuming you haven't thrown the book across the room by this point, you have further delights to come: Harrow admits girls! Oh, no wait, just one girl, and that's for reasons which are completely realistic and would totally happen in real life; just like Harrow offering Agriculture as a subject, and Andrew being the only American in the school, and the only new person in the 6th form, and everybody there being white and English (apart from Andrew, oh and Rhys, the Welsh Agriculture student).When a location is (as far as I can tell) so important to the plot it can't be remade as an unnamed public school - as in Patrick Gale's Friendly Fire, which is based on Winchester - you'd better, at least, glance at the website.

I gave it till P78, but even when the story had got going my suspension of disbelief was shot and I was questioning everything (would the police have conducted the interview like that, or does Andrew count as a minor?) Andrews motivation was flimsy. The final scene I read - that of an attempted rape of a child who I fully anticipated finding out was a ghost - pointed too heavily towards public school cliché and, frankly, made me disinclined to read any further.

Terrible. Go and read his other book. That's much better.