Siebenundzwanzig
Book Title: "The Outcast"
Author: Sadie Jones
Page Count: 444
First Published: 2007
Rating: superfunk - golden - sweet - blah - superblah - blergh - goatfood
There was nobody there to meet him.
Right after I wrote that I needed something that felt like a holiday for Easter, I went to my shelf, and finally decided on this. I've had it for a while, and had high expectations for it, for several reasons. a) Someone, a reviewer, said it was like "Atonement". I love "Atonement", so something with the same setting and a story of redemption would be just my thing. b) The Cover is one of my favourite things ever, a photograph from the 1940s that has been coloured in later, I don't know the word. c) the back promises a love story where two outcasts forge their own future together. I thought that sounded nice.
So, to begin with, this is not the same setting as "Atonement", but shortly after, not in the excitement between the wars, and the zest for live during, but after the war, when people, for some reason, became stuffy assholes for a while. The prose is boring but I bet someone has described it as "hauntingly beautiful in its sparseness", and it's not a love story. It's an angst story. It reads like the author wrote a lot of reasons to angst on little slips of paper, put them all in a hat, and pulled one out every ten pages. There's alcoholism, spousal abuse, self-harm, quasi-incest, neglect, mental disorders left, right and centre ... you name it, it's in it, everything except for eating disorders, really. The characters are all so self-destructive that you want to bash their heads in every few pages when something new happens that makes their lives even worse.
I've really not had much luck with books recently. Maybe I should re-read something next. Maybe "Atonement".
Author: Sadie Jones
Page Count: 444
First Published: 2007
Rating: superfunk - golden - sweet - blah - superblah - blergh - goatfood
There was nobody there to meet him.
Right after I wrote that I needed something that felt like a holiday for Easter, I went to my shelf, and finally decided on this. I've had it for a while, and had high expectations for it, for several reasons. a) Someone, a reviewer, said it was like "Atonement". I love "Atonement", so something with the same setting and a story of redemption would be just my thing. b) The Cover is one of my favourite things ever, a photograph from the 1940s that has been coloured in later, I don't know the word. c) the back promises a love story where two outcasts forge their own future together. I thought that sounded nice.
So, to begin with, this is not the same setting as "Atonement", but shortly after, not in the excitement between the wars, and the zest for live during, but after the war, when people, for some reason, became stuffy assholes for a while. The prose is boring but I bet someone has described it as "hauntingly beautiful in its sparseness", and it's not a love story. It's an angst story. It reads like the author wrote a lot of reasons to angst on little slips of paper, put them all in a hat, and pulled one out every ten pages. There's alcoholism, spousal abuse, self-harm, quasi-incest, neglect, mental disorders left, right and centre ... you name it, it's in it, everything except for eating disorders, really. The characters are all so self-destructive that you want to bash their heads in every few pages when something new happens that makes their lives even worse.
I've really not had much luck with books recently. Maybe I should re-read something next. Maybe "Atonement".