I’m afraid I simply got bored with Continental Riff and gave up about two-thirds of the way through. It’s amiable enough, but there really wasn’t enough to maintain my interest and I decided that life was too short.
This time, the Stockwell Park Orchestra is on tour in Europe. Er...and that’s about it. The best bits of these books come when Isabel Rogers writes in detail about the music being played; these are quite excellent, I think, and really bring the pieces (and the books) to life. Sadly, there’s only a little bit of this and the rest of it is pretty mundane. There’s a lot of detail about how a touring orchestra is organised and managed which is quite interesting for a while, but Isabel Rogers is very inclined also to give us a lot of very tedious detail about who has what for breakfast, plus a number of pages of what adds up to a list of attractions in Amsterdam, Cologne...etc, padded with mild banter from the players. Any “eventful” occurrences rely on a very crudely drawn xenophobic, malodorous, aggressive and generally repellent temporary orchestra member. It’s all thoroughly unsubtle, the comedy didn’t work for me and I just got tired of it in the end.
I’m sorry to be critical, but I think I’ve reached the end of the road with this series. The parts I enjoy and which have kept me reading are so thinly dispersed that I’m no longer finding it worth the effort. I say this reluctantly, because Rogers writes pretty well and the book has an air of charm which we could all do with at the moment, but I can’t really recommend it.
(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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