Isabel Rogers - Life, Death and Cellos

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

There are things I liked about Life, Death and Cellos, but overall I found it disappointing.

I was looking forward to this because classical music is a real interest of mine, and I’m pleased to say that the book’s real strength is the musical background. Isabel Rogers plainly knows a great deal about the music and about playing the cello, all of which she brings to life wonderfully – and I speak with all the authority of a dreadfully bad teenage cellist who hasn’t touched the instrument for many years. :o) I thoroughly enjoyed the passages dealing with the structure of various pieces, the technicalities of playing the cello, the workings and personalities of an orchestra and even the background history of Stradivari instruments. Sadly, the other aspects of the book didn’t work nearly so well for me.

Part of the problem for me is that the book isn’t the “mystery” it is billed as; it’s more sort of chick-lit-with-classical-music as we follow Erin, a twenty-something amateur cellist, through her relationship problems, her problems at work, discovering her talent as a cellist...you get the idea. Frankly, the story felt pretty stale and dull to me, it’s blindingly obvious where it’s heading from quite early on and it plods from one unlikely but entirely predictable event to the next as things fall inevitably into place. The dialogue creaks rather and Rogers is forever explaining the meaning of conversations rather than writing good enough dialogue simply to show it convincingly. We get far too many points of view from slightly thinly-painted characters (several of whom are wholly irrelevant and are just a distraction), the humour is often pretty clunky and there’s an awful lot of filler like this, as a character gets into the back seat of a car:

“‘Shift forward Erin,’ he said, as he tried to fit his knees into the car. ‘I have real men’s legs. They are longer than you think.’

Erin obligingly slid her seat forward and felt the car’s suspension dip as Charlie’s weight fell in.”

It’s just a bloke getting into a car, for heavens’ sake! Or a couple of pages of wholly irrelevant faffing about not looking at a mobile phone immediately before the sender of the crucial text walks in and imparts the news anyway. Wading through a lot of this stuff became a real trial.

So, despite the good musical aspects, I can’t recommend Life, Death and Cellos. It may be for others but it wasn’t for me.

Stina Jackson - The Silver Road

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I’m afraid I found The Silver Road formulaic and rather tedious. I tried it hoping that the setting in Northern Sweden would give it some atmosphere and originality, but it didn’t and I had to struggle to the end.

The central idea is oh-so-familiar. Lelle’s daughter has been missing for three years, having disappeared from a bus stop one morning. Lelle’s marriage has broken up as a result, he has developed an alcohol problem and he obsessively searches the remote countryside looking for her. Meanwhile, a dysfunctional mother and her teenage daughter move in with a local, reclusive resident...and that’s pretty well all that happens for at least the first half of the book. It’s all very, very familiar stuff, it moves very slowly and I wasn’t convinced by either the events or the setting, so even when things did begin to happen I wasn’t really involved.

The prose is adequate but tends to be repetitive and over-written in a search for atmosphere, and finding a dreadful cliché in the first couple of pages (“he knew the road like the back of his hand”) didn’t augur well. It’s not terrible by any means, but it wasn’t good enough to engage or grip me.

I’m sorry to be critical but, despite the publishers’ claims, I didn’t find The Silver Road either compelling or haunting. It’s an unoriginal story in a setting which isn’t sufficiently well painted and I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to Corvus for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Sarah J. Harris - The Colour Of Bee Larkham's Murder

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I’m afraid I didn’t think that The Colour Of Bee Larkham’s Murder was all that good. I feel churlish saying it because it’s written with good intentions, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is narrated by Jasper, a 13-year-old who has autism and synesthesia, so that he cannot recognise faces and experiences sounds and some other senses as colours. He has a very patchy memory and is convinced that he killed his neighbour, the eponymous Bee Larkham. The plot, which moves extremely slowly, is the emergence of the events leading up to Bee’s possible murder (we don’t know the truth for a long time) intercut with Jasper’s day-to-day perception of the events in his life.

Plenty of people have loved the book, and fair enough. It’s certainly not exploitative, it’s an original viewpoint and it is well-intentioned – although I did feel that there was some over-sentimental emotional manipulation at times. The main problem for me, though, is that Jasper’s voice just didn’t ring true as that of a 13-year-old. Just as an example, at one point he says,

“...I walked into his bedroom. He put his real book behind the cover of Lee Child’s.

Understanding Your Child’s Autism And Other Learning Difficulties.

I expect he’s studying it right now. Trying to get a grip on why I’m difficult. Why I’m different from other teenage boys.

Why I’m so hard to love.”

The use of paragraphs especially is a technique of an adult author trying to make a punchy point and to me it really isn’t the voice of a bemused young teenager. I found this throughout the book and that, combined with a rather stodgily paced story prevented me from becoming involved.

There have been some superb books written from the point of view of narrators with various mental health problems – Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident..., of course, and Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall, Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet?, Gavin Extence’s The Mirror World Of Melody Black and others spring to mind. This isn’t in their league, I’m afraid, and I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

(My thanks to HarperCollins for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Soren Sveistrup - The Chestnut Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Standard, clichéd serial killer stuff

I ended up pretty thoroughly annoyed with The Chestnut Man. To be fair, it’s not a genre I would normally read and I wouldn’t have touched it if it hadn’t been by the man who created the excellent TV series The Killing. This means that fans of the serial-killer genre may like it far more than I did, but for me it was just a series of tired old clichés strung together, albeit strung together quite well for much of the book.

In Denmark, a series of sadistic killings (of women, naturally) is marked by the killer’s trademark Chestnut Man left at each scene. A maverick cop, sent back to the Copenhagen police after his insubordinate behaviour annoyed his Europol bosses, suspects that these killings may throw doubt on the solution to the murder of the daughter of a prominent politician a year before. There is a Race Against Time to catch the killer before...I’m sure you get the picture.

I read this while I was ill and needed brain-off entertainment. The first 400 pages didn’t do too badly on that, but I just ticked off the clichés as they went past: the maverick cop and his ill-matched partner who begin to form an attachment; the boorish, sexist police colleague; the vain, unheeding boss; the killer who is always One Step Ahead and Plays Games With The Police, child abuse as a cynical plot device, the female investigator under threat...and so on and so on. I could just about live with all that, but the final 100 pages became so silly that I lost patience, and I especially disliked the corny old Cornered Killer Climax In Which The Killer Explains Everything To The Victim scene (yeah, right), which in this case is largely repellent, misogynistic torture porn. The explanation scarcely holds together and the psychology is pretty silly, so coupled with the ludicrous implausibility of subsequent events it made me very irritated indeed.

I had expected something deeper and more thoughtful from Sveistrup, but The Chestnut Man is just another bog-standard Scandi serial-killer thriller. There’s no superbly original central character like Lisbeth Salander to lift it above the ordinary, and nor, of course, does it benefit from a brilliant screen performance from the likes of Sofie Grabol or Sofia Helin which made The Killing and The Bridge such classics. Fans of the genre may enjoy this, but I’m afraid I didn’t.

(My thanks to Penguin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Karen Thompson Walker - The Dreamers

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good indeed

I thought The Dreamers was excellent. It’s a little hard to put my finger on exactly why, but I found it wholly involving, very thoughtful and genuinely touching in places.

A mystery illness begins to spread through a college campus in a remote California town. People fall asleep and, although they are obviously dreaming, they simply can’t be woken and the illness spreads quickly, causing national worry. The story sounds like a tediously familiar old trope, but Karen Thompson Walker makes it fresh and original. She does this partly by giving us the stories of a variety of characters affected in one way or another by the illness, which she does beautifully. These are recognisable people with recognisable emotions and responses, and Thompson Walker paints them beautifully. She catches the small, everyday events and internal responses which so define a life and a person so that I became very involved with each one of them.

Her other great strength is her style. Her prose is beautifully poised; it is unflashy but has a poetic rhythm to it and the whole book seems to have a quiet, almost soothing pulse to it, even when describing extreme events. This antithesis of the normal style of catastrophe fiction is extraordinarily effective and for me gave these events a far greater poignancy. It is just a pleasure to read.

As to what it’s actually about...well, it’s hard to be precise, but it’s important. Thompson Walker has things to say about the human condition, the wondrous complexity of the physical world and of the mind, the haphazard nature of existence and about what reality may be to a human consciousness. There are many fine, affecting stories here but one in particular about a “Dreamer” who is pregnant comes to a conclusion which I found truly moving and very thought-provoking.

I’m struggling to express clearly why I liked The Dreamers so much, but I did. I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Scribner UK for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister The Serial Killer

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good first novel

I thought My Sister The Serial Killer was very good. It is original, involving, dark and very well written.

The book opens in present-day Lagos as Korede receives a phone call from her younger sister Ayoola: “Korede, I killed him,” and Korede goes to help. Not, it turns out, for the first time. Set in Lagos and narrated in the first person by Korede, we learn of Ayoola’s exceptional beauty, the sisters’ background and how Korede has always looked after and protected Ayoola. Tension is well built as Korede’s guilt and suppression of secrets cause her inner turmoil, added to by Ayoola’s supreme indifference to the consequences of any of her actions.

It’s a gripping story which has at its heart a brilliant portrait of someone whose sense of her own perfection and entitlement means that she does largely what she wants, oblivious to the damage to anyone else, and simply makes up a different story if the truth doesn’t suit her. (An allegory for our times, perhaps?) There is also a tense plot, shafts of wit and a good background of Nigerian society. I was impressed – not least because the book is reasonably short and all the more impactful for it. A very good first novel, which I can recommend.

(My thanks to Atlantic Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

C.M. Taylor - Staying On

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and thoughtful

I enjoyed Staying On – far more that I expected to from the synopsis, to be honest.

It is the story of Tony and Laney who have been living as ex-pats in Spain for many many years, where they own and run a pub. Tony is now seventy and as both age and Brexit take their toll, very few of his ex-pat friends remain and the pub is struggling. Tony wants to return to the Yorkshire of his youth while Laney refuses to set foot in England again. As their son, his wife and their 3-year-old son come out to stay after many years, old tragedies and guilts which have lain beneath the surface emerge and have a profound effect.

Frankly, it sounds rather familiar and not really like my kind of thing. However, C.M. Taylor writes very well, he creates convincing characters and structures the story very nicely, so that within a readable and engaging story, the book makes important points about families, the meaning of home, friendship, class and other things. I found it touching rather than profoundly moving, but that’s fine with me. I thought it was an unsentimental but compassionate view of a somewhat insular community of Brits abroad and Tony made a very recognisably human protagonist.

I liked the note in the acknowledgements: “I was told by men with expensive educations that people don’t want to read about the working classes. I’d like to thank those men for the motivation.” For me, Taylor has proved them wrong with this book and I can recommend it.

(My thanks to Prelude for an ARC via NetGalley.)