Rating: 3/5
Review:
Disappointing
I expected to like this book a lot, but I'm afraid I found
it rather dull. It tries to make
important points about race and diversity in general, but it didn't engage me
enough to make them with any force.
The story, set in late 1965 is ostensibly about the
disappearance of an actress and the attempts of her dresser (the eponymous Anna
Treadway) and the police to locate her.
In fact, it is largely about the characters of the story and lengthy
back-stories are rather ploddingly revealed of Anna herself, a West Indian man
whom she meets, a Cypriot café-owner, a Northern Irish police sergeant and so
on and so on. It was all reasonably
competently done, but I never became involved enough in the characters to care
sufficiently so it just got rather boring, I'm afraid.
Part of the problem is the period setting. I am, sadly, old enough to remember the
mid-60s, and this just didn't feel like that time to me. Again, it wasn't badly done as such; there
were only a few anachronisms in speech and nothing stood out as being out of
place, but I never got any real sense of period either. There are some slightly clunky topical
references to try to establish the period, but I just never felt that I was
there somehow.
This is not an actively bad book by any means. Miranda Emerson writes decent prose and it's
all perfectly competent, but I just couldn't find any real period atmosphere or
interest in the characters. Others have
plainly enjoyed this far more than I did, but I can't really recommend it.
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