Rating: 3/5
Review:
Rather generic and unengaging
I'm afraid I got a bit fed up with this book. It's competently written and has its good
points, but overall I found it generic, a bit unconvincing and rather
predictable in many ways.
The story is narrated by Emma, a high-powered obstetric
surgeon who begins to realise that she is neglecting her family due to being so
ambitious and driven at work, so agrees to go with the family to Botswana
where her husband has been offered an important research post. It is revealed in the first couple of pages
that when they get there her baby son is taken from his cot, which drives the
plot.
The book is written in the now apparently obligatory
fractured time-frame with the circumstances leading up to the abduction
intercut with events afterwards, with added flashbacks to childhood which give
convenient pop-psychological explanations for Emma's driven
competitiveness. It all feels very
formulaic, I'm afraid. I do admire Jane
Shemilt for creating a rather unsympathetic protagonist, which is a brave move,
and the medical background is very well portrayed, but I eventually got rather
bored. The style felt like so many other
creative-writing-course-influenced books, with the same little tropes and tics
of vocabulary and structure, the plot wasn't that gripping and neither the
characters nor the background were sufficiently well drawn to engage me
properly. And, of course, Emma learns
her Important Life Lesson by the end.
This isn't dreadful, by any means. It is competently written
and does have some merits, but overall I found it rather dull and I can't
really recommend it.
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