Rating: 5/5
Review:
Gripping and thoughtful
I thought this was an excellent book - very readable, extremely atmospheric, insightful and memorable. The book begins with the discovery of a body and the circumstances of how it came to be there gradually emerge in an extremely well-told story. It is not a detective story of any kind, but is concerned with the lives of the narrator and two of her school friends and how they came to be involved in the story. It switches easily between the present day and descriptions of events when they were all thirteen in 1997, and I found myself gripped and enthralled throughout.
I don't want to give away any plot details, but I found the story very plausible and the characters extremely well drawn. Jenn Ashworth is excellent at evoking the relationships between teenagers, and I thought truly brilliant in showing the life of a child in a family with a father with mental health problems. The atmosphere of a small City (never named, but with a striking resemblance to Preston) also seemed completely real to me, having spent my teenage years in a comparable city. The book has important things to say about teenage life, families and the effect of guilt both real and imagined, and is also very acute about the public and media response to tragedy.
My one reservation about this book is that I am not sure that someone of the background and education given to the narrator would be able to write so well or make such penetrating observations, but the book was easily good enough to make this seem irrelevant. It's very good indeed and recommended very warmly.
No comments:
Post a Comment