*insert bad Proclaimers impression* - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

Very often, when I'm enjoying a book, I experience a certain amount of trepidation about where it's going to end up. Many a promising book has fallen apart in the last third, usually because a clever premise lacks the necessary legs, or an equally clever conclusion, or the not-clever conclusion doesn't offer anything else to make it worth the journey (like character, or writing, or setting).

This book did not do that.

This is one of the few books I've read where I had total confidence in the author from the off. I loved it even more by the end than I did at the beginning, and that is a rare, rare thing for me. Sure, I could sit here and make pedantic comments about what would actually happen if you tried walking to Berwick in unsuitable shoes, or complain that there are no great surprises plot-wise, but those things didn't matter because this is wonderfully written and has well-drawn characters who are relentlessly human. It's sad, it's funny, it has buckets of charm which never risks becoming saccharine thanks to the emotionally true (and *raw*) undercurrents. I had to stop reading it in the Post Office queue because I was wearing mascara at the time.

So, yes. I loved it utterly. Normal cynical service will be resumed forthwith.

If I wanted to spend time with a man like this, I could just leave my house - The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison

[A Note: I'm going to give you a SPOILER ALERT because at times this review refers to things which happen quite far along in the book, but any actual spoilers and specifics have been put in highlightable textblocks].

I have a particular pet hate about books: I really hate misleading blurbs.

I hate blurbs which tell you what happens in the book more than 15-20% of the way through.

The blurb for The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving tells us that Benjamin Benjamin and his charge Trevor, a 19 year-old with MD, travel across America to see Trev's dad.

They set off at around 47%.

Happily, the preceding hundred or so pages are spent showing us what kind of person our narrator is while very, very slowly trying to build up tension about the exact circumstances in which his kids died. Unfortunately, he's a casual misogynist who needs to spend some time googling Schroedinger's Rapist. If it made a difference to the story in some way, great, no problem, but I didn't feel it did. If it had felt deliberate, again, great, no problem, but this didn't.

At one point I was ready to put it down unfinished: Ben stalks a woman he went on a date with (he was supposed to go out and get laid - the assumption is she's fine with that) to her place of work and then mentally calls her a bitch because she - having previously signalled her disinterest in him - arranges for a colleague to serve him.

But, people like this exist. Lots of them. And having one exist in fiction is not a bad thing any more than having serial killers and paedophiles is, it's just not what I want to read. The bad thing was that after those first hundred pages *poof*, he's no longer like that. And maybe you could argue this was his character arc, that he was redeemed by the decision to take Trev to visit his dad and by the hours spent in a car with the Spiritually Noble White Trash Girl - (c)The Ghost Of Charles Dickens - but actually what happens is that they spend some time in a car together and he isn't the jerk he previously was. Maybe she farts sedatives.


Once the lads do set off - well, it's weak. It feels far too much like it's actively trying to emulate Little Miss Sunshine. A jazz hands of "kooky" characters is assembled in a very obvious type of way and Trev and Ben pretty much stop being the people they were before and become cliché (Trev) and whatever the narrative needs him to be (Ben). Throughout the book Ben's character lacked fidelity for me in lots of tiny ways - I have trouble with the idea that a stay-at-home dad (to a son and a daughter), is unable to see women as people unless the narrative requires him to. It could have been a good point of conflict and tension for him, but it lacks that self-awareness to kick it up a notch leaving me to back away slowly rather than take an interest.

The writing is fine for the most part, although at one point I assumed Ben was having a stroke because a particular description was given twice in close proximity and I took it literally.

As a pedant, I didn't feel the logistics of situation were thought through so Trev's MD felt like a device to get the pieces assembled:

When Ben is arrested, no mention is made of what is going to happen to Trev, or who is going to look after him. No provision was made for the time Ben was in the cell.


Another example of the this meatworld logicfail: Trev plays Xbox games but he doesn't appear to have PC internet access. For somebody with motor difficulties, a voice operated PC would be an obvious tool to have.

And then there is the great emotional payoff that isn't: what exactly happened the day Ben's kids died. It doesn't work: it's not a shock because it's pretty much gone into earlier in the book - I was expecting something new, or some detail, something which would make me view it, and Ben, differently. Instead of being emotional, or going "Ah, now I get it", I was just thinking it's a good job the sprogs did cark it because otherwise this whole book wouldn't have happened. Also, more pedantry to do with the specifics of the situation.

If it hadn't lost me so early, or if Ben had continued to be a misogynistic arsehole throughout the book rather than just the first hundred pages, maybe I would have liked it more. As it is, there's nothing much here to recommend it and it's fairly irritating, especially the whole "lads saved by women" trope.

I'm going to give it two stars and make sure you know it's nothing like Little Miss Sunshine. People who don't see what's wrong with the stalking bit can give it 3. I'm not averse to reading something else from this author, but it would depend on the blurb.

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.

Sometimes sequels are better off not written - Every Seventh Wave by Daniel Glattauer

(Every Seventh Wave is a sequel to Love Virtually, so this review contains spoilers for that book which is incidentally very good and which I'd probably give four stars to).

I've read an email affair. I have what I believe the kids refer to as "Mad Skillz". I was going to explain more about that but I can't do so in a short way, so just take it from me that I know what a casual email which turns into something more reads like in real life. It's quite a lot like Love Virtually, which is really good.

I first heard the radio play version which stars David Tennant and the eminently watchable/listenable to Emilia Fox (although it's also fair to mention I've never seen/heard Tennant in a bad performance either. If you doubt, three words: Kafka the Musical.) (That's not to say Tennant's never *given* a bad performance, it's just that he's hidden it from me, which gets me to wondering what else he's hidden from me. I believe I've already mentioned my Mad Skillz, Tennant: think on.)

If I had a criticism of the radio play, it was that it felt rushed, which the book does not. I've read it twice, and the second time - with the benefit of Meatworld Knowledge - I was especially struck by how well it's done. It's written as a series of email exchanges beginning when Emmi Rothner, attempting to cancel a magazine subscription, mistypes the email address and sends her increasing frustrated missives to Leo Lieke. They strike up a friendship and the title of the book gives a heads up for where it goes after that.

The pacing of Love Virtually is done really well. The characters are well rounded; Emmi in particular is quite unpleasant. She is demanding, self-centred, vain, and spoiled, but, crucially, she is very readable. Then there is the ending: it was perfect. Leo is leaving for Boston and Emmi is supposed to be going round to his flat so they can meet face to face before he goes, just once, only she doesn't and when she writes to Leo to explain why, all she gets is the autoresponder telling her the email address no longer exists.

So I was disappointed to find out there was a sequel. Emmi and Leo were not epic star-crossed lovers. One of the nice things about having a book which is purely email exchanges is that it allows the reader to have their own opinion, and mine is that they were selfish, stupid fantasists who got carried away with themselves and needed to think about the people they were hurting. Every Seventh Wave is a sequel for people who were rooting for Emmi and Leo, and by god is it tedious.

What was well done in Love Virtually is boring, and repetitive here. There is a glimmer of something better at times, but for much of it there are no outside forces, no real life world forcing itself in. This book begins with Emmi's exchanging messages with Leo's autoresponder, months after he's left for Boston, but what's missing is the hole in Emmi's life which leads her to still sit there sending messages to this guy 9 months after he left. The hole was there in Love Virtually, she could be frivolous Emmi, saying what she thought without worrying about it, but here it feels convenient, and that's a good summation of the book. Stuff happens, but it's not compelling and it's reported by the characters, rather than the more natural exchanges of Love Virtually.

Crucially, I don't know what Emmi and Leo see in each other. More than once I found myself wondering why one or the other of them didn't tell the other to take a running jump. I could forgive if it was entertainingly bitchy, or even just human, but it's dull and it's boring, and in the end I just didn't care.

In brief, it feels like it was written because the first was such a big success, and that's a shame.

If you were the type of person desperate to find out what happened next with Leo and Emmi, you'd probably like it, but otherwise let Love Virtually stand alone. I found the story a great disappointment, so I'm going to give it one and a half stars.

I feel increasingly bad for posting this review in multiple places - Tollesbury Time Forever by Stuart Ayris

In Tollesbury, psychiatric nurse "Stuart Ayris" accompanies the police to the home of one of his patients who has not been seen for over two weeks. Inside, they find no trace of Simon Anthony, only words crawling across the walls, the words you, oh reader, are about to sit through.

For the most part, this is not a terrible book, it's more... not very good, and that's a shame because Stuart Ayris is clearly a man who can write. The problems I feel there are with the writing could be overlooked but unfortunately there is no story here and the ideas are neither profound, original, nor expressed well enough to make the trudge through the text worth it. The last 30% is actively terrible. It was always going to struggle with the banal path it gave its protagonist, but I found it shallow to the point of offensive in the way it offloads the conflicts. The female character of the second half is particularly poorly drawn and I was given no sense she's lived the life the book tells us she has.

From the beginning, the structure didn't work for me. It's a nice idea, a "found document" text, and something of which I am particularly fond - except, if it's going to be a found document text, then it has to read like one. There needs to be a narrator who has written this and a present for them doing that. If they are writing it from a position of knowing the whole story, that is likely to be reflected in the text. It isn't. There is also the matter of the transcription; "Stuart Ayris", rather surprisingly, has nothing to say about some of the content.

The narrative is further weakened by being written more as a standard 1st person past tense. The prose is overly descriptive with Simon persistently giving descriptions of places he should - as a character - already familiar with, eg "The trees that lined the track upon which I walked gave way to a neat field on the left but held up on the right.". There are moments when the language becomes disjointed, reflecting the narrator's state of mind - except it isn't the state of mind because this is being written up afterwards. I don't want to go into it too much because of spoilers, but little or no consideration has been given to the Simon who is writing this story on the walls.

Then there is the language. I'm not a fan of the self-concious olde worlde syntax especially in this found document context (if you're writing on the wall, surely more likely to use abbreviations). It's also repetitive. The sky is always the firmament, every time Simon reacts to something we get to find out he breathes, holes in doorways are always apertures, "literally" - also once misused. Many times it feels like the author is just not paying enough attention to what he's written: we are told Simon's clothes don't look out of place in 1836 - yet he's wearing jeans. There is one moment where we are told what another character thought. The less said about the phrase "pulsating penumbra" the better.

Then there are the similes, not all of which work and not all of which hold up to applied logic: "the torch beams picked out [the words] as if they were groups of well-ordered flies" - which is a nice image until you wonder why nobody had bothered to try the light switch, or why they were there late enough to need torches. I'm also the kind of person who works out how much wallspace you need for 100K words (writing floor to ceiling, about 25ft) - I didn't get the sense the author did.

At times the book is trying far too desperately to be profound. Unfortunately the fail state of profound is #pippatips: "When the only way a man can deal with another man is to kill him, then that man will be a friend to no-one for as long as he lives [...]"

Then - the poetry. It's not good. There are exclamation marks, and it's been made to rhyme. And one of those rhymes is "ring a ding ding!". Again, it's pushing to these big ideas but there is not enough substance in them and there's no awareness there.

Although it is very well written (and published) for a self-pubbed work - there are some errors, mainly in punctuation and I'm not sure you can imbibe a view - but it isn't, in my opinion, good enough to be published. While perfectly readable if not very good for the first 70%, it is totally derailed by the rest. It's a shame because, as I began by saying, Stuart Ayris can write, but he would also benefit from a ruthless Beta or two. Pass on this one, but I'll have my fingers crossed for something better from Mr Ayris in the future.

One last thing - I'm unamused by the copyright violations. It is right and fair that people are paid for their work; plus quoting "I am the Walrus" tends to make it look as though ones grammar has gone totally awry.

If You're Going to make a comparison to Downton, actually *watch* it first - Habits of the House by Fay Weldon

You know when you get a book and because it's by somebody whose work you like, or somebody who's written many, many books, you trust it's going to get better?

Meet Habits of The House. It's not entirely its fault; it's been given a stupid cover (
I'm not sure who that girlie is supposed to be), and it's being pitched to Downton fans despite the fact it's a comedy of manners.

However, everything else is its fault.

Especially the ending.

The storyline is to do with the son of the family trying to marry an American heiress because the family have significant money troubles.

In the end (highlight to read the spoilers):

The Earl wins a cumulative bet on the races which solves all the money problems, *and* the son marries the heiress, *and* the wife of the Jewish financier gets to meet the Prince of Wales.

"Hey Garth, let's do the super happy ending!"

doo doo do doo, doo doo do doo, doo doo do doo ...

I suspect it's supposed to be a punchline, but it just left me wondering what the point of reading the sodding book was.


I like Fay Weldon's style of writing, so I'm giving it 2 stars, but everybody else should probably give it a miss.

Thought I'd like this, did - Shadowplay by Laura Lam

NB Shadowplay is the sequel to Pantomime, so this review contains spoilers for that book; I'll put a page break on this review to keep you safe. You can find my review of Pantomime here. It is possible to read Shadowplay without having read Pantomime as the key information about events is reviewed as it is touched upon, but - even though this is better - I would recommend reading Pantomime first.

Also, this book was provided to me for no monies by the kind peoples at Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry, facilitated in this act of goodness/marketing by the mighty NetGalley. 

The short non-spoilery version of this review: Yeah. It was pretty good. If your tastes run to YA (which mine don't), make this 4 stars.

Well ... it tried - Night Film by Marisha Pessl

At any given time I have 86 bajillion things to do, which means much of what I'm trying to do gets shunted to one side while I deal with those things actively on fire.

I meant to write a review of Night Film when I read it but time and Chrismas have conspired to push it onto my "No, I'll definitely do it *this* week" list - that is, the tasks which are penciled in for April. So it is this review has ended up not being written until now, when I'm merely supposed to be making doctors appointments and cleaning the oven as opposed to anything of vital importance.

Because of this, it's going to be slightly vague and I can't double check things because the book has gone back to the library, but I do have things to say, hence the review.

Those things are, basically, that Night Film wants to be a spooky, psychological thriller, but spooky psychological thrillers only work if the reader is carried with them. Night Film trips itself up, badly, and beneath the effort and the "scan these things with your phone and you can watch a video on the interwebs!" is a book which doesn't manage to be much more than "fine".

I have complaints, in particular that at times it feels the author hasn't thought the details through properly. It's a pet hate of mine anyway but it's also a big deal in a book which is trying to make you guess what is and isn't real. In this instance, a character is remembered as taking pictures with a Leica which is fine, except the character in question lacks a thumb, index and middle finger (which on an SLR you need to support the lens and adjust the focus). Yes, I'm really that anal.

I found the characters weakly done. Nora, who helps Scott investigate due to totally legitimate reasons which would absolutely happen in real life, is particularly desperate. Ashley, whose suicide protagonist Scott is trying to investigate, is irritating despite spending all but the prologue being dead. Every single sodding person the investigation leads them to (and there are quite a number) goes on and ON about how amazing she was, and how she had this way of LOOKING at you. It almost got away with it, prompting sarcastic asides rather than a fully blown book fling, but set in the context of the resolved story it's an especially low point.

Initially I thought Night Film was going to be like the readable bits in House of Leaves (I'm dyslexic. Me and the footnote have a tortured history), and I would have settled for something reasonably intelligent, but it's neither of those things.

There are some good parts - a sequence towards the end of the book is particularly good and exactly the kind of thing I wanted to see from the rest of it - but they are rather derivative if you know your directors.

It's readable enough and because I like that it's trying to do something even though it fails, I'm going to give it three stars.