meghan_is_reading's reviews
1998 reviews

short stories, very British(I'll admit to not paying much attention when I picked it up and thinking it was a Canadian author, which is the only reason I was surprised)

I wished a few were a little bit longer, but overall nice enough. One or two made my heart hurt with the familiarity. If you like finding yourself in another's familiar pain, or in the right mood, it works out nicely. Otherwise you just might end up sad.

Seamus wants to be an artist, wants to be a somebody, and dreams of escaping to London as soon as he gets out of his private prep school that he can't pay attention to. His classmates are miserable to him, his teachers are miserable to him, his parents are miserable to him, but his dreams are encouraged by his one friend and his therapist. And school might be ending sooner then Seamus dreamed.

This book is all about the events to Seamus getting out, not how the escape itself works out... maybe there will be a sequel. I would have loved this book as a teenager. All the authorities are uniformly fucked up and the main character is escaping away. Although, from this vantage, and I think the reader's vantage you know just how much he doesn't know... but I was rooting for him anyway. Just because all the voices seem to council caution in the face of his crazy plan, I still kinda hope that it works out for him anyway.

Cute, old school Sherlock Holmes type detective stories. Everyone worth a character is male, the action revolves around wordplay and storytelling. Nobody doing much jumping around.

The writing is good. For once I have to stop and actually read the words that make up the sentences. I forgot I like that, part of the reason I so enjoyed Moby Dick while in Spain, so much language to loll about in rather than chasing the action and skimming dialogue.