- Hardcover: 262 pages
- Publisher: ISIS Publishing; Large Print edition edition (Nov 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0753165147
- ISBN-13: 978-0753165140
- Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 16.2 x 2.9 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Excess Baggage
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Judy Astley's Excess Baggage defies categorisation. Is it a literary piece? Or a very funny and sharply written comic novel? Actually, Astley writes the kind of book that creates its own category, as anyone who has read Just for the Summer, Pleasant Vices and Every Good Girl will know all too well. Excess Baggage is quite her most beguiling novel yet, with a range of characterisation and hilarious situations that top even her previous books.
Astley's heroine, Lucy, is dreading the "Proper Family Holiday" that is in prospect. She has been struggling as a house painter with an uneventful love life and a 12-year-old daughter when her parents suggest that she forgets about the expired lease on her flat and joins them (along with her surly sister Theresa and vaguely paranoid brother Simon) on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Caribbean. For this, the siblings have been told to bring along children and even au pairs. But what is their parents' agenda? Quickly, the tensions that divide the family at home come bubbling to the surface and, in the course of some fraught situations, Lucy's life is not the only one to be changed irrevocably.
From the opening chapter when Lucy staggers blearily around to the Beatles on the radio (as she stuffs clothes into her hideous puce nylon hold-all) to the brilliantly orchestrated finale featuring (of all things) a hurricane, Astley rarely puts a foot wrong. The reader does not have to be a single mother to identify totally with the beleaguered Lucy, and her squabbling family are equally engaging, however horrible. However, it's Astley's authorial voice that is always sure-footed, such as the passage with Lucy's brother Simon remembering sex in odd places:
...there'd been the boat on the Norfolk Broads, holidaying with Plum's hearty outdoor cousins who were so scrubbed-clean wholesome that Simon had been sure they thought babies were made by some strange practical handicraft as per instructions in a scout manual. It had been almost disappointing to get married and realise that sex was not only permitted but compulsory, and in a safe dull duveted bed.--Barry Forshaw --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Book Description
A family holiday in the sunny Caribbean turns into more of a torment than a treat.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I don't agree with the two star rating this book has received so far. This is a really light and amusing story about an extended family holiday in the caribbean (Antigua)and all the trials and tribulations when grown up siblings and their families get are thrown together too closely for too long, especially when there is a raging hurricane thrown in. One of the husbands has a tricky dose of a sexually transmitted desease caught from a hooker which is pretty hilarious scenario - give it a go.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have read most of Judy Astley's books, and enjoy them as a light read. However, I would not rate them as great literature. I am always surprised to read the reviews from renowned newspapers claiming them as such.
In particular, this book was one that I found very hard to read. I found it very claustrophobic. Other reviewers have described it as "boring", I am not sure that is the correct word. Throughout the book, the impending hurricane is announced, but when it actually happens, near the end, it takes only a few pages and is not really that exciting.
I find all of the characters to a large extent unrealistic and this is a disappointment. I myself have two teenage children, and they simply do not react in a similar fashion to the way Judy Astley describes, neither do any of their friends.
So while I continue to read Judy Astley in bed before I fall asleep, that is unfortunately as far as it goes, especially with this novel.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I have always enjoyed my time with Judy Astleys books, but Excess Baggage has been an exception. None of the characters had any qualities you could identify with, let alone sympathise with - definately flatter than a hurricane flattened island!
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