claire_fuller_writer's reviews
1030 reviews

Not much happens in this book. A family travel to California by car for the rapture, when they will all be saved. It's the voice of Jess - the fifteen year old daughter - that makes it wonderful, and the tiny observations she makes along the way that rang so true. It's a coming of age story where Jess eats her way through the fast food restaurants of America. It's witty, and funny, and kind of sad and lonely too. Highly recommended.

There were exceptional things about this book: Firstly the dialogue, which was so real, but without being dialogue in real life which is full of dead ends and ums and ahs. Riley's dialogue brought the characters alive. And also how absolutely awful Edwyn is - the circular arguments he has, the way he twists everything. Riley makes him the most fascinatingly horrible character.
But, there was also something slightly dissatisfying about the book, that's hard to pin down. It felt more like an extra long short story than a novel. It meandered too much for me, and I found it so hard to follow the timeline that in the end I stopped worrying about that and just read it.

I did really enjoy this book about the life of Gustav, a Swiss hotelier and his relationship with his mother and his best friend - neither of which treat him very well. It's easy, and the writing is good (although something about it keeps the reader at one remove from the characters), but I'm not sure it's the sort of book I will remember much about in a year's time.

For me this collection was really mixed. I absolutely loved the first story and would give it five stars, and I very much enjoyed the last, but some of the others in the middle just weren't for me: 'Her Share of Sorrow' especially, where the characters seemed cliches, and the story weak. In many of them it was the endings that didn't seem quite right. It's not that I want every tied up neatly, but I kept feeling as though they didn't end in the right place.
In this collection Hadley is at her best when she's evoking a particular period in time (1960s) and location. The writing, setting and story in 'An Abduction' were completely perfect

Sad and slow and beautiful.

My goodness, this book. Amazing writing (especially about nature), gripping, visceral, brutal story, that I just couldn't drag my eyes away from.