L.E. Truscott's Blog

Book Review: Sensual Whispers by Michelle Anne Noonan

I haven’t reviewed many poetry collections, mostly because I find it’s a difficult medium to strip down to its basic components. It’s almost never about fully developed characters or intricate plots (which are what I am usually looking for in writing) and compositions that would be ridiculous in a novel somehow work beautifully in a poem. And, yes, I struggled with trying to coalesce the mixture of feelings I had about this work, too. But here goes.

Sensual Whispers is a short collection of deeply intimate poetry. It seems to emerge from a genuinely felt place of love and lust and loss and what the belief in and commitment to these things engenders deep inside the person narrating. Rather than separate pieces on divergent topics, it tries to tell a story. One poem feeds into the next, showing us the ups and downs, the highs and lows of an intense relationship.

This might say more about me as a reader than it does about the writer but I couldn’t quite figure out what the story was – were they together and happy at the end or was it just the memories of a great love keeping the narrator content? It’s a common problem with verse novels and narrative poetry – caught between two mediums, the poetry and the prose – and the beauty of the words sometimes overtakes the importance of the reader understanding what’s going on in the estimation of the author.

I’ve had this problem before with poetry collections – I am a very literal reader – so instead of understanding, I was instead left simply with an impression, a feeling, an instinct about what the author wanted to achieve, but no real certainty. But sometimes that’s enough when you’re reading poetry.

I think it helps to imagine the author whispering sensually (take the title as an instruction) each block of words and it really doesn’t help if you’re hearing it like a high school student reading it aloud in English class. This is one of those collections I suspect is best absorbed in a live reading from the person who wrote it, who can imbue it with the intensity of feeling that must have been experienced as it was being written. On the page, it almost feels like a play waiting to be brought to life.

Still, there are some nice moments. “Love will make her see a thousand mirrors.” I think all writers would hope to create a line like that at least once in their careers.

3 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 12 December 2021

Book Review: Pretty Baby by Mary Kubica

I’ve had several people tell me that I would like Mary Kubica books and on the surface, since they are ostensibly suspenseful thrillers, that would seem to be the case. But this one just did not speak to me. It was a very slow burn and the thing that can make a slow burn okay, a beautiful twist that you never saw coming, never eventuated.

Heidi and Chris are married with a pre-teen daughter. He’s a high-flying financier and she’s a “bleeding heart” – Chris’s description – who works with refugees and immigrants. One day on the commute to work, Heidi sees a clearly homeless teenager with a baby and her need to help kicks in. Before Chris knows it, teenager Willow and baby Ruby are living in his study.

He’s wary because Willow is a bit of a mystery and won’t talk about her background. He wonders if they’re all going to be stabbed to death in their sleep. But Heidi is enamoured with their house guests, especially the baby. She once dreamed of having a big family but it never happened. This could be the next best thing. But, of course, it isn’t. Because they’re all keeping secrets.

Heidi and Willow are the two main characters and they actually have entirely separate and worthy stories but because they have to share the space, they both seem like they are elbowing each other aside. As a result, neither has the impact they should have. Also, barely any of the story is happening in real time. As the story starts, Willow is already in custody for what she’s done and Heidi is years past the events that finally blow up in her face. It meant there was no real urgency, no sense of the possibility that the story could go anywhere. It felt like we were heading in one very obvious straight line the whole time.

There’s also a husband who may or may not be cheating on his wife with a stereotypical femme fatale from his office and none of it is very original.

If you like unreliable narrators, then here are two of them you can indulge in to your heart’s content. But if you’re looking for a cleverly plotted story, you won’t find it here.

In a word: uninspired.

2 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 20 July 2021

How to Write a Novel in Three Months

I won’t be offended if nobody has noticed but maybe some of you have: my blog has been awfully quiet for the last three months. I didn’t plan it. It just sort of happened. Because I started writing a new novel. And I just never stopped. At least, not until last week when I finished the first draft. Yes, I wrote an entire 100,000-plus word novel in just under three months.

I was posting on Twitter whenever I hit milestones so I can actually track how I progressed:

26 April – began writing
30 May – 10,000 words
7 June – 20,000 words
10 June – 30,000 words
11 June – 40,000 words
11 June – 44,000 words
14 June – 50,000 words
16 June – 60,000 words
18 June – 70,000 words
21 June – 75,000 words
22 June – 80,000 words
28 June – 90,000 words
15 July – 100,000 words
17 July – 103,000 words and done

According to those dates, I wrote 80,000 words in June alone! I slowed down after that and I remember why. Because I got to about 95,000 words and realised the plot had been heading in the wrong direction for the past 10,000 words. I deleted a large chunk, thought about it for a bit and then started writing again with some new ideas.

On some days, I wrote over 10,000 words and on other days, I wrote nothing (those days were mostly when I had family commitments I couldn’t get out of). When I average it out, I wrote approximately 1,250 words a day. For anyone who’s been reading my blog posts for a while, you might remember I do something called Project October every year. It’s a month of intensive writing where I try to get 1,000 words a day down on paper. I’ve been doing it for years and it’s something I’ve always found very exhausting. Usually, by the time the end of the month rolls around, I’m absolutely desperate to stop writing for a while.

So imagine how amazed I was when I just kept writing and writing and writing for nearly three months. I did three Project Octobers in a row. And not only that, I was actually enjoying it!

Anyway, I thought you might like to know how I did it and see if you can do it, too.

Don’t Start from Scratch
I think part of the reason I was able to accomplish so much in such a (relatively) short period of time was because I’d been thinking about these characters for a while. At the end of 2019, I finished writing a crime novel that I’d been writing for seven years. I left it alone for a year while I edited and published another book, then went back to it at the end of 2020 to do rewrites. But I was pretty happy with it and barely made any changes.

Even though I’d written it as a stand-alone book, I really liked those characters. I particularly wondered about a couple of moments of sexual tension between two of the main characters. The story in the first book didn’t lend itself to the possibility of any romance but I was desperate to find out what happened after that story concluded. I started daydreaming about it. I couldn’t stop daydreaming about it. And the only way to stop daydreaming about it was to write it and find out.

As I started writing the sequel, I realised it felt a lot like writing fan fiction. I’ve never written fan fiction myself but one of my nieces reads a lot of it and I felt the way she acts when she talks about it. It was wonderful exploring the beginnings of this new relationship. Of course, then I had to murder somebody (it is a crime novel, after all). But the fact that I was already so invested in these people and that I knew them really well made it so satisfying that I just wanted to keep going and going and going. So I did.

Don’t Have a Day Job
I’ve been working for myself for the past couple of years now so I don’t have a traditional day job that takes up all my time. Of course, freelance work would come in and I would complete it as it did but for the most part, I had a lot of time to do as I pleased. And it pleased me to write.

I know if you have a day job that it’s not practical for me to tell you not to do your day job. I’m just telling you how I accomplished writing a novel in three months and that was a huge part of it.

Don’t Do Anything Other Than Write
Okay, look, I did do a few other things – eating, sleeping, watching a game of football here and there, babysitting my nieces on a couple of occasions – but on the whole, writing took up most of my time. It may also have helped that where I live, we went into a three-week lockdown to get on top of a COVID outbreak and I wasn’t allowed to leave my house except for necessities.

But even when I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about the story and the characters all the time. I got a bit obsessed. I fell in love a little with one of the characters and couldn’t get him out of my head. When I wrote his first kiss with the other main character, my breath caught in my chest. When I wrote their second kiss, I nearly passed out from the pure joy it gave me. I just kept writing because I was so excited to know what would happen next.

Don’t Worry Too Much About Character Names
I usually spend a lot of time coming up with the perfect names for my characters but for this, because I wanted to keep powering on, I would scroll and point on my Twitter feed and give them placeholder names. That was how I ended up with Jock, Jack, Jillian, Janet, Janey, Judith, Jude, Jake, Jenna, Jim, James and Ginny.

The first thing I did after I finished the first draft was spend a day renaming all the characters and they’re a much more diverse bunch now. But I’m glad I didn’t worry about it at the time I was writing the story because it would have slowed me down for sure.

Don’t Power on When You Know Something Isn’t Working
I had two moments of pause during the three months I was writing this novel. The first was at 40,000 words:

It was a small pause though:

Phew!

The second pause happened when I got to around 95,000 words. I was stuck again. I went back to find the last point at which I was happy with the story and the first point at which I stopped being happy with the story. It was at around the 85,000-word mark. I’d written 10,000 words that weren’t taking the story in the right direction.

But I didn’t delete them. Instead, I cut them and pasted them into another document. Why? Because there were little moments between the characters that I knew were good and I wanted to incorporate them back into the manuscript if I could.

I rewrote the 10,000 words between 85,000 and 95,000 words three times, meaning I actually wrote about 30,000 words to get those 10,000 words right. But once it was done, I knew the story was back on track and the end wasn’t far away.

Don’t Overthink the Ending
Once I got to the last part of the book, I realised I had no idea how to end the story. The previous book had a wonderful twist and I wanted something similar for this one. I tied myself in knots trying to come up with one. And… nothing.

I searched the internet for articles on how to end a novel. One of them gave the advice that it should be unpredictable but logical. Simple enough when someone else points it out. I was writing a crime novel so there were four logical options:

*The killer dies.
*The killer gets off scot-free.
*The killer goes to a clinic for the criminally insane.
*The killer goes to jail.

In the first book, the killer (spoiler alert) dies so I thought it would be too much of the same thing. And there’s no poetic justice (let alone actual justice) if the killer gets off scot-free. That left a clinic for the criminally insane or jail. Was the killer sick or just evil? In the end, a little bit of both. But what I realised was that the killer had spent the while book terrorising a group of people and the thing that would really annoy them was not getting what they wanted, having what they wanted dangled in front of them and taken away at the very last moment. A final death was averted and the group of people the killer had terrorised were safe, much to the killer’s dismay. It’s not perfect but I’ve got plenty of time for rewrites to get it as close to perfect as I can.

*****

And that’s pretty much it. Except for, you know, the long and hard slog. It’s unavoidable. But if I could do one of these long and hard slogs every year instead of writing more slowly all year round, I think I’d choose it. Especially if I have as much fun spending time with the characters I’m writing as I did this time around.

The only problem? I’m already wondering what happens to them next.

Book Review: Hideout by Jack Heath

Spoiler alert number one! Timothy Blake is a cannibal. This is the third book in the series after Hangman and Hunter so if you didn’t know about Blake’s icky predilection already, you haven’t read the first two and this isn’t the book to start with. It’s best to read them in order because you get to experience the shock of discovering his penchant for eating human flesh and then decide if you can stomach reading about it for an entire series.

Spoiler alert number two! Timothy Blake doesn’t eat a single person in Hideout. And considering he’s hiding out in a remote farmhouse with a group of people who run a torture porn and snuff film website – so he’s got lots of worthy scumbags to choose from – it ends up being kind of a disappointment.

In the second book, Blake’s romantic interest and FBI agent Reese Thistle discovered his cannibalism and disappeared. Now, figuring his life is over and not wanting to go to jail, he has decided to kill himself. But not before he takes out Fred, who runs a website that posts footage of torture and murders for paying subscribers.

However, when Blake turns up to Fred’s house in the middle of nowhere impersonating Lux, who has previously sent Fred torture videos to earn his trust and who Blake has already killed, the house is full of other people just like Fred. They call themselves the Guards. Torturers, murderers and sadists who help him run the website and create content by beating and tormenting the handful of captives locked up in the shed out the back.

Well, he might be a cannibal but Blake doesn’t want all of these people on his conscience. So he decides to take the Guards out one by one in order to save the prisoners. But before he can enact his plan, one of the Guards is discovered dead in his bedroom. It looks like suicide but Blake is immediately suspicious. Fred asks him to investigate, reasoning that Blake couldn’t have been the killer because he was with Fred at the time. Everyone else, therefore, is a suspect.

The problem with this plot is that all the suspects are bad guys, the victim is a bad guy, the main character is a bad guy and it’s hard to care about any of them. And they’re not really interesting bad guys like Blake was in the first book. They’re just a bit blah. Even Blake is just a shell of his former self. And then there’s a weird subplot involving one of the Guards who may or may not be Blake’s biological son from a decades old sperm donation.

There’s a real sense of claustrophobia about Hideout as it’s set in a middle of nowhere location and the characters hardly leave it until the last part of the book. When an author writes a story like this, with limited characters and settings, it’s incumbent on them to make sure the characters are fascinating and the settings are intriguing. Instead, the characters seem like losers and posers and the setting is a mostly ordinary house with a lot of padlocks and the meant-to-be-creepy instructions not to go upstairs. It’s not Mrs Rochester in the attic but it comes damn close.

In the end, this just seems like a not particularly sophisticated effort to reset Timothy Blake’s world just as it was about to spiral completely out of control. So instead of working for the FBI or a local crime lord like in the last two books, he’ll instead be working for another agency in future books. But if he keeps losing body parts at the rate he currently is, there’s barely going to be enough of him left for the action required.

In a word: bland.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 May 2021

Book Review: The Woman in the Window by AJ Finn

According to TS Eliot, good writers borrow and great writers steal. Here is the book that proves it isn’t true. The Woman in the Window has literally cherry-picked plot points from so many well-known books and movies that it’s hard to find a single moment of originality within its pages. While it certainly makes for a readable (and very familiar) book, it’s hardly the formula for a remarkable novel.

Anna Fox has been an agoraphobic shut-in for ten months. She’s separated from her husband and daughter (although she speaks to them daily) and her only connections to the outside world are her basement tenant, David, who does the odd jobs that being a shut-in prevents her from doing; Bina, the physical therapist who is helping her recover from the physical injuries that led to her becoming a shut-in; and Julian, the psychiatrist who is helping her recover from the psychological injuries that led to her becoming a shut-in.

To pass the time, Anna uses her experience as a former child psychologist to counsel others with agoraphobia on a website forum called the Agora, plays online chess, watches classic suspense movies and spies on her neighbours as they go about their lives. And, of course, there’s the alcohol. Copious amounts of it.

When the Russells move in across the park, they are a painful reminder of the perfect family unit Anna has lost. Their teenage son Ethan brings a gift from his mother, then his mother Jane saves her from a panic attack when she steps outside to chase away Halloween trick-or-treaters egging the front of Anna’s house. They end up spending hours chatting, drinking, smoking and playing chess. Jane even sketches a picture of Anna.

About 150 pages later (it seems to take a long time to get to the main plot point) and after Anna spends a lot of time sitting at the many windows of her huge house and creepily looking into the houses of all her neighbours (don’t these people know how to close the blinds?), she sees Jane arguing angrily with someone in her lounge room. Anna can’t see who else is in the room. Jane disappears behind a wall and when she emerges back in front of the window, a silver handle is sticking out of her chest and blood stains the front of her shirt.

Anna immediately calls 911 and tries to leave the house to render assistance but has a massive panic attack in the park and passes out. The emergency services dispatched think she is the emergency and take her to hospital where they have to sedate her to get her to calm down. When she wakes up the next day, she’s told she imagined the whole episode and that Jane Russell is fine. Except when she goes home and Jane Russell arrives to prove she’s fine, she isn’t the same woman Anna spent all those hours with. Is she really going crazy or is someone trying to cover up a murder?

Sound like something you’ve read or seen before? A bit Rear Window-ish? A bit Copycat-ish? A bit Girl on the Train? The whole story is a mish-mash of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, We Were Liars, Vertigo and about 100 other classic Hitchcockian movies. AJ Finn isn’t shy about letting the reader know how much he’s stealing from other writers – the main character sits down and watches those black-and-white movies every night and uses them to help her figure out what is going on.

The main problem is that if Anna has seen it before in a movie, then the likelihood is that the reader has as well. So nothing seems new or different. The writing is done well and I read the whole book in two days but the plot and the characters are just not worthy of a novel with as much hype as this one has.

The truth is that AJ Finn is actually much more intriguing than anything he has written. The name is the pseudonym of Dan Mallory, a former book editor who weaved a fake personal history involving having cancer, completing a doctorate at Oxford, the death of his mother, the suicide of his brother and his discovery of JK Rowling as a crime writer (none of which are true apparently). If someone wrote a biography about him, I’d probably find that much more interesting than this derivative book.

The Woman in the Window is just barely tolerable. If I were going to recommend anything to do with AJ Finn, it would be the articles exposing him because they are about a real mystery. And if he could come up with all of that backstory for himself, he should have been able to come up with something nearly as good for his debut novel. But he didn’t.

2.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 20 April 2021

Book Review: Bruny by Heather Rose

Bruny is a very long love letter to Tasmania and Tasmanians, the kind of book most mid-career writers think about writing, an indulgence of a personal passion. It’s just a shame that Heather Rose forgot there needed to be a compelling story to entice in those not already enamoured with her home state in the same way she is. So what should have been a beautiful but subtle persuasion ends up being more like a hectoring lecture.

Astrid Coleman is a conflict resolution negotiator for the UN and has lived in New York for years after fleeing Tasmania (and her selfish mother) as a teenager. Back home, her brother, JC, is the Premier and leader of the conservatives, while her half-sister, Max, is the leader of the centrist opposition. Her ageing father, struggling with dementia and only able to communicate in Shakespeare quotes, was an MP for years. They’re a complicated political family, which is why Astrid has kept her distance.

When her brother calls pleading for help in the aftermath of a terrorist bombing (in Tasmania, of all places!), she refuses – until she receives another call from someone with a little more sway to get down there and secretly report back on everything that is going on.

The Tasmania Astrid remembers is still there as beautiful and tranquil as ever, except for one thing – the destroyed remains of the Tasmanian side of a Chinese-bankrolled bridge to Bruny Island. Bruny Islanders – all 600 of them – have been protesting ever since the infrastructure was announced. It has been variously condemned as unnecessary, oversized, destructive to the environment, poorly envisioned and antithetical to the idea of Bruny, a tranquil and mostly still undeveloped paradise.

JC asks Astrid to run interference with all the main players – local, federal and Chinese government intermediaries as well as all the different protest groups (and there are a lot). She meets with them all individually, networking and hearing their concerns, placating and matchmaking where she can. Meanwhile, the federal government uses the bombing as an excuse to ram through new foreign labour laws and JC imports hundreds of Chinese builders to make sure the bridge is repaired and completed by election day just a few months away.

But nobody can quite explain why there needs to be a huge bridge. Conspiracy theories abound. JC speaks in typical political jargon. Max prevaricates. And Astrid remembers all the reasons she left in the first place.

I’ve seen this book referred to as satire but I doubt anyone who isn’t Australian would perceive it that way. In fact, I think most Australians would struggle to see it as satire. It hits all the political high notes (or low notes, depending on how you look at them) – refugees, terrorism, foreign labour, foreign property ownership and business investment, espionage, climate change, hypocritical family values and nationalism – and it comes across as melodramatically unrealistic and silly, even as all the characters take themselves very seriously. One of the Australian senators is called Barney Viper and is referred to as a “snake in the grass”.

The novel starts with the bridge bombing, which leads the reader to think it’s going to be action-packed, but after that, there’s almost 300 pages of nothing (I literally turned the page and thought to myself, 200 pages of nothing, and it kept going for at least 75 pages after that.) And a lot of the scene setting of Tasmania as part of the Australian commonwealth displays a very big inferiority complex going on. References to Tasmania as being a drag on the welfare system, as being unable to pull its weight economically, as being uneducated, illiterate and innumerate, as being “benign” and not really inclined towards activism, none of which is accurate. Last year, it was the top performing state economy in the country. And we’re talking about the state that prevented the damming of the Franklin River. How much of a love letter can this book be if it portrays Tasmanians like this?

There are elements of prophecy embedded in the story, however. Published in 2019, Heather Rose depicts two cruise ships full of tourists pulling into Hobart with hundreds of cases of gastro and pneumonia and customs officials refusing to quarantine them for fear of a public relations disaster. They overwhelm Tasmania’s already stretched health system. Just a year later in the real world as the COVID-19 pandemic was enveloping the globe, the Ruby Princess disaster unleashed hundreds of infected tourists on Sydney and set off infection chains around Australia and a disastrous second wave.

The problems with this book are all in the execution. It’s a lovely idea and Tasmania probably has many things that are now extinct in other parts of the world – it’s beautiful and remote and pollution-free and mostly still untouched wilderness thanks to a lot of hard work to keep it that way – but as a tribute and as a novel, Bruny misses the mark.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 7 April 2021

Book Review: You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen

As soon as I finished reading this book, I thought it would make a great movie and then I read the acknowledgements to find out Greer and Sarah’s first two books are already in the process of being made into films. These writers are really on a roll.

Shay Miller is an unremarkable woman. She lives in New York and has been temping since she lost her data analysis job as part of a downsizing. She likes her roommate but she’s less fond of his girlfriend so she heads out early on a Sunday morning to spend some time alone. Down in the subway, she just misses a train and is forced to wait on the platform for the next one with a dodgy guy and a woman in a pretty sundress. She moves in the direction of the woman, hoping for safety in numbers. But just as the next train is arriving, the woman turns to look at her, then throws herself in front of it.

Shay’s life is turned upside down. She tries to take comfort in the numbers – since she’s a data analyst, she researches suicides, the methods and the frequency – but she can’t bring herself to take the subway anymore. And because she can’t stand not knowing why it happened, she tries to find out more about the victim.

Amanda Evinger, a nurse, was the woman who threw herself in front of the train. Through flashbacks, we’re introduced to her and her close-knit group of friends. They seem like the kind of New York women everyone wants to be. Beautiful, successful, confident. But they’ve got a secret – they did something bad – and Amanda couldn’t cope with it anymore.

Shay finds out about a memorial being thrown for Amanda and goes to pay her respects. But when asked how she knew Amanda, she doesn’t want to say she didn’t know her – what kind of weirdo goes to the memorial of a woman she never knew? – and she doesn’t want to admit that she was the last person to see her alive. Thinking quickly, she sees the blown-up picture of Amanda with a cat and lies that they shared a veterinarian.

Sisters Cassandra and Jane Moore know Shay is lying as soon as she says it because the cat in the picture belongs to them and Amanda didn’t have any pets. They’re already on edge because of the secret and now they wonder if Shay knows it, too. In the days before her death, Amanda wasn’t herself. Did she confess what they’d done before taking her own life?

To find out, Cassandra, Jane and their friends invite Shay into their glamorous world, taking her out for drinks and helping her find a new apartment. They also get her a new job and set her up with the perfect man when she admits she’s just begun online dating. And all the while, they pump her for information. Shay’s initial lie turns into more lies to cover it up and the women are sure she’s onto them. So they decide to kill two birds with one stone and set Shay up to take the fall for what they did.

Shay has a touch of Eleanor Oliphant about her but it’s a more realistic portrait of loneliness in the modern age instead of the weirdo stereotype Eleanor was saddled with. It makes her the perfect target. And the story has a touch of The Girl on the Train about it as Shay involves herself in the lives of people she really should stay away from. The authors have taken all the best elements of a number of bestselling novels and come up with one of their own that is not too shabby.

The writing is flawless and stitched together so well that you wouldn’t ever suspect the book has two authors. Shay is a little naïve but it makes sense in the context. And the rest of the characters are built with enough complexity to keep them interesting yet realistic. But the book still lacks the one final element – the gut punch – that would make it a great story instead of just a good one.

In a word: more-ish.

4 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 8 March 2021

Book Review: The Book of Names by Jill Gregory & Karen Tintori

I really had to push myself hard to get through this book and when I finally finished, I said, “What a waste of my book reading time!” Yeah, this isn’t going to be a glowing review.

David Shepherd is a politics professor at Georgetown University and a divorced secular Jew. A childhood accident left him with a peculiar side effect: random names pop into his head, accompanied by blinding headaches. He has written them all down but hasn’t given much thought to why it happens or what it means.

When Beverley Panagopoulos’s name pops into his head, he decides to Google it and discovers she was recently murdered. Bemused, he begins searching hundreds of other names in his journal and discovers a significant proportion of them have met untimely ends in the not-too-distant past. When he tells a priest friend, he is advised to go to New York and seek out a rabbi. The rabbi and an expert from Israel named Yael tell him the names are of the Lamed Vovniks. There are 36 Lamed Vovniks in each generation, righteous people on whom the existence of the world as we know it depends. And someone is trying to kill them all and bring about the beginning of the end.

David is sceptical – it all sounds a bit farfetched – but his former stepdaughter is on his list of names. And when the rabbi is murdered right in front of him, he and Yael go on the run. First, they have to save themselves. Then they have to save his stepdaughter and the world.

David is right – it’s all very farfetched. There is a huge amount of exposition explaining the Jewish and Kabbalistic mysticism that the plot is based on and while I normally enjoy that kind of thing, my eyes started to glaze over after a while. The result is a poor man’s Da Vinci Code.

The writing is terribly melodramatic . Characters are frequently “incredulous”, “stunned”, “heartened”, “full of hatred”, “frustrated” or “terrified”. And all of them are either very good or very bad, with no shades of grey. They lack any suggestion of complexity or subtlety. They also seem to lack personalities. And, of course, there’s the obligatory inappropriately timed romance. Even as people are being murdered around them, David is distracted by Yael’s obvious beauty (yawn).

Honestly, I don’t have much more to say about it. It’s an interesting idea badly executed and poorly written, populated by people I didn’t really care if they lived or died. I’m usually very reluctant to give books one-star ratings but when I thought of all the books I’ve given two-star ratings to, I just couldn’t dishonour them by including this one in the same category.

In a word: dreadful.

1 star

*First posted on Goodreads 5 March 2021

Book Review: The Girl Before by JP Delaney

Unreliable narrator warning! If you hate being lied to in your literature, do not read this book! Especially since it’s possible not a single character can be trusted.

Emma is the recent victim of a violent break-in who no longer feels safe in her apartment, so she and her boyfriend Simon are looking for somewhere new to live. After turning down everything within their budget, they are shown one last option: the minimalist, open plan apartment at One Folgate Street where everything is controlled by technology – security, lighting, water, heat, everything. There are no keys or taps or light switches; the house is “aware” and an app on a phone and a program on a laptop are how everything is accessed. Simon isn’t keen but Emma feels safe in the fortress-like environment.

The landlord is a bit weird though. They have to answer a long questionnaire, meet him for an interview, commit to living a minimalist lifestyle (no clutter, no knick knacks, pretty much nothing of their own at all to be moved in with them), follow about 200 finicky rules and allow architectural enthusiasts and students to tour the award-winning house a few times a year.

A few years later, singleton Jane is recovering from the stillbirth of her daughter. After quitting her high-paying job and starting part-time work at a stillbirth support charity, she needs somewhere cheaper to live and One Folgate Street is available again. She finds the concept of the place intriguing, the rules not too onerous and the landlord, Edward, very attractive.

Told in alternating chapters from Emma and Jane’s perspectives, they begin very similar “unencumbered” relationships with Edward in separate timelines. The relationships, he tells them, will last as long as they are “perfect” – and not a second longer, the unspoken part of the agreement seems to be. He takes them to the same restaurants and museums, buys them the same clothes and jewellery, and chides them over minor breaches of the “no clutter” policy in the apartment. There is more than a touch of Christian Grey in his personality and not in a good way.

Both women become absorbed with Edward’s past, specifically the deaths of his wife and son, and delve into the history without his knowledge. There’s some vague suggestion that he may have been responsible and he comes off a bit like a serial killer, so it seems entirely plausible. But there’s something Jane (in the future) knows that Emma (in the past) doesn’t: Emma is going to die at One Folgate Street.

The book starts off a little slowly as the characters go through the very strange application process. I couldn’t actually believe anyone would want to live in a house where their every movement and minute is monitored. The tenants are assured (without proof) that no one is actually watching – apart from the computer’s sensors – but it’s still very creepy. And then it gets creepier as Edward pulls the same moves on both women – exactly the same moves.

Jane remains pretty much the same person throughout the story but Emma’s gradual decline becomes more apparent the longer it goes on. The real problem is that the book relies on us caring about the resolutions to the mysteries – how did Edward’s wife and son really die? who kills Emma? – because the people themselves aren’t especially interesting. In fact, by the end of it, I was very confident I could have done without ever knowing these people. And when the resolutions to the mysteries are revealed, they are hardly earth-shattering.

The ending is the real slap in the face though. There is something one character suggests another character do that is just so offensive I wanted to burst through the page and slap his face repeatedly.

The book’s saving grace is that it is written really well. I stayed up until three o’clock in the morning to finish it because it was really readable, despite its flaws. If JP Delaney can come up with some complex characters you actually want to spend time with and an ending that doesn’t make you want to rip the pages out and write your own, then I would considering reading more of his books.

In a word: unsettling.

3 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 17 February 2021

Book Review: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

This is another one of those books that I only picked up because everybody else has read or is reading it. It’s nice to be able to report that quite a good proportion of the hype is justified. It’s certainly easy to see why Netflix were falling all over themselves to turn it into a movie.

Lara Jean Song Covey is the middle sister of three Korean-American girls. Her father is an OB/GYN and her mother died quite a few years ago so they’ve got their routine down pretty good now. Margot, the eldest, is the organisational expert, Lara Jean is her somewhat competent assistant and Kitty, the youngest, isn’t expected to do much yet. But that’s about to change because Margot is going away to college in Scotland.

But before Margot leaves, she breaks up with Josh, her boyfriend of two years who also happens to be the boy next door, because of something her mother said many years ago: never go to college with a long distance boyfriend because you’ll miss out on too many experiences. Which is all well and good for Margot. But Lara Jean is left behind with a heartbroken neighbour who is also one of her best friends. And if she’s honest, she’s always had a little bit of a crush on Josh herself.

Lara Jean has never really been in love before but her routine for getting over her crushes has been to write a letter to them, then seal it in a hatbox in her cupboard, never to be read – she literally puts a full stop on it. But as she starts her junior year of high school, the boys she’s written to all approach her and ask why she’s sent them these letters.

She’s mortified and, of course, she isn’t the one who sent them. When she rushes home to investigate, her hatbox and all the letters are gone. Most of the letters aren’t too bad – her crush on the very handsome and popular Peter was a long time ago and Lucas is now quite obviously gay and she can explain her way out of them without too much embarrassment. But when Josh wants an explanation about what she wrote to him, she brushes it off, lies about dating somebody else now and then launches herself into Peter’s arms in the hallway at school and kisses him passionately in front of everyone. Lara Jean doesn’t care about everyone, she just wants to make sure that Josh thinks she isn’t interested. Apart from anything else, he’s her sister’s former boyfriend and sisters don’t date their other sister’s former boyfriends.

Peter is initially bemused at her “affection” but once she explains, he and Lara Jean come up with a mutually beneficial plan: they’re going to continue having a fake relationship to keep Josh away for Lara Jean’s sake and to either make Peter’s former girlfriend wild with envy or convince her that their relationship is over once and for all – he’s not quite sure which way he wants to go yet. Cue one of the oldest romance tropes in the business.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a really readable book but that’s because the prose is very simplistic, oddly simplistic for the age of the main character. Lara Jean often comes across like a pre-teen and then in the very next moment, she’s fake French kissing Peter in front of everyone at school (and at one point in a hot tub). It also feels like quite a long book but the flip side of that is the longer you read it, the more enchanted you become with the characters. Not with what’s going on – because it’s all a bit ho hum, certainly nothing original, a pretty familiar romance cliché with a pretend couple to make their potential partners jealous – but with the characters themselves.

However, it’s nowhere near perfect. It’s pretty obvious who sent Lara Jean’s secret letters out; I’m not sure why she didn’t figure it out straight away – there was really only one person it could have been. And Lara Jean and her sisters feel like the most unKorean half-Koreans who ever existed. When people of colour talk about wanting to see themselves represented in literature, surely that doesn’t mean just pasting an exotic face on the same old stories that have been told for decades.

There’s no ending either so that makes it clear that there’s going to be a sequel, which is kind of annoying, because that makes it an incomplete book and forces you to read the next one if you want to know what happens. That’s fine for those who are enamoured but for those who were waiting for a good ending to be tempted into reading the next book, it feels like entrapment instead.

Still, it’s a fine effort and a good example of a young adult romance without being ground-breaking.

In a word: appealing.

3.5 stars

*First posted on Goodreads 14 February 2021