Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
I didn't get on with this book. It is a good idea for a story but for me it wasn't sufficiently well written or structured to work as a novel.
It is revealed early on that the chief protagonists of the book are former prostitutes now grown old, and the book is concerned with their histories, their characters and what took them along the path they ended up on. It is also about attitudes to them both in the past and the present, and how humanity or lack of it may affect people's lives. It's an original and interesting idea and I was looking forward to reading this book, but I'm afraid I was very disappointed.
The problem for me is in the quality of the writing. Molly McGrann has a slightly stilted style in places which often feels rather self-conscious. Her descriptions of characters and their inner worlds felt forced to me, without delicacy or finesse and with little real insight. This, and the rather frequent use of stale phrases like "next thing she knew," for example, meant that they began to feel like rather crude stereotypes rather than well drawn characters. As a result, I began to lose interest in their stories.
The prose is too often awkward, especially from a "literary critic, poet, novelist and former editor at the Paris Revue." Take this sentence, following a (rather predictable) rant about people who strip all the character out of old houses: "So too would this house soon have that fate." I found that a badly structured, stilted and ugly volley of monosyllables which threw me straight out of the narrative, and the same thing happened in quite a few other places. It often seemed rather amateurish to me - including the ending which was intended to be moving but which I just found absurd in its ridiculous implausibility.
I'm sorry to be so critical, but I really didn't think this was very good. Others have obviously enjoyed it so do read their reviews before you let me put you off, but I really can't recommend this.
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