Rating: 5/5
Review:
Funny, thoughtful and engrossing
I thought this was an excellent book. It has a brilliant narrative voice telling an engrossing story, it is very funny in places and covers some very important themes with insight and compassion.
Do avoid spoilers if you can because the narrative is very well structured so that revelations come in a way which makes you think all the more carefully about what is being said. This makes it difficult to say too much about the content of the book, but it deals superbly well with themes of how families interact (or fail to), of kindness and cruelty, of the nature of memories and of our childhoods and of our relationship with and responsibilities toward animals. There is also a reminder of the monstrous inhumanity (and deep unreliability) of some psychological and other experimentation. This makes it sound grim and worthy, but it isn't - it deals properly with serious matters, but never becomes turgid or preachy.
This is largely due to the great narrative voice. The story is addressed directly to the reader in the first person by Rose, whose life and family are the subjects here. She has a wonderfully dry, witty and slightly ironic voice which is never overdone but makes the book extremely readable. To give you a flavour, early on she recounts how no-one ever spoke to her about sex or menstruation. "One day a packet of junior-sized tampons was left on my bed along with a pamphlet that looked technical and boring, so I didn't read it. Nothing was ever said to me about the tampons. It was just blind luck I didn't smoke them." Or, describing her grandma who loved gossip, "...she was a great reader of historical biographies and had a particular soft spot for the Tudors, where marital discord was an extreme sport."
I really enjoyed this book. I found it readable, gripping, funny, thoughtful and moving - not a bad list of attributes in a novel. Very warmly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment