Sarah Pinborough - 13 Minutes

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit disappointing

This book has good things about it – an interesting premise and an excellent beginning, for example, but it has some pretty serious failings, too.

The plot is part crime/psychological thriller and part exploration of the world of relationships between teenage girls.  It has plenty of twists as we get closer to the truth of why Natasha ended up in the freezing river and whose heart stopped for thirteen minutes as a result.  To say more would give away more than I would have wanted to know before starting, but this is quite structured so that the real solution doesn't emerge until close to the end of the book.  Along the way we get a lot of examination of the relationships between Natasha and her friends, especially her ex-best friend Becca, from whose point of view a good deal of the narrative is told.

[You may like to be warned that there are some pretty frank descriptions of sex and drugs (although sadly, very little rock & roll) and frequent use if the f-word.  I thought it was all absolutely justified in creating realistic setting and character, but I know some people don't like to read about such things.]

Much of this is pretty good.  Sarah Pinborough writes well as a narrator and it's an interesting story, but I did have some serious reservations.  Principally the book is too long at 400 pages and needs some serious editing.  It really does go on in places, so that I ended up being reasonably interested in what happened in the end but not at all keen on the prospect of having to read another couple of hundred pages to get there.  The narrative is told in several forms including journals, texts, official and news reports and - suddenly and clumsily in the closing pages - a first person internal monologue.  Some is good, but it's a bit clunky at times, with a rather implausible and apparently irrelevant romance which turns out just to be a means for the author to get a police officer into a convenient place at the right time, for example.  Also, there is some active misleading of the reader about the authorship of some of the texts which I think goes beyond what is acceptable in a mystery.  Added to this are some pretty serious implausibilities and an ending which I found plain silly, so I did struggle a bit.

I'm afraid I didn't quite find the plot, the characterisation and motive or the analysis of relationships quite convincing enough. I have recently read Holly Bourne's brilliant Am I Normal Yet? which I found far better at depicting relationships in a similar situation.  For me, 13 Minutes didn't really live up to its promise and I can only give it a rather lukewarm recommendation.