Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Entertaining, Spell-Binding Tale, 27 Mar 2008
Although the title refers to May, the daughter, this story is very much the story of both mother and daughter. It begins with Ida as a teenager, meeting and falling for Errol.. a love that never leaves her.
I initially had reservations about using a real famous person in a fiction book, but it does work. Errol is obviously important, and I did find myself looking him up, to see how realistic his character was, but he's not a central character, and this helps. Once past the initial part of the story, there is so much more to keep you interested.
Whilst reading, the book seems to move at a fairly comfortable pace, but at the same time, I often found myself wanting `just one more chapter'. I carried this one around, just so I could dip into in my spare minutes. It's the type of book that you get caught up in before you realise it's happened.
The majority of the story is set in Jamaica, during a period of unrest - the history is quietly presented.. enough to give an insight, without distracting from the real story.
It also deals with racism from a slightly different angle.. because of May's mixed background, she never feels completely accepted, as she feels neither `coloured' or white. This leads to May feeling an outsider.. a feeling I'm sure many feel at some point at their lives.
This is an entertaining, spell-binding tale, which would make a perfect holiday read.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Apart from the smell of the bouganvillea not much to recommend, 2 Sep 2008
This book is readable, but only just. There is a story, as the other reviewers have explained, but I found myself uncaring of the ending. The writing lacks depth and the narrative style is commonplace. There is no more to the story than what happens, unless perhaps, the tropical setting, which, for one based in rain-soaked England, is alluring. I wonder what makes the book successful for others? Perhaps the link to Hollywood? Perhaps the lack of profundity? I don't know, but I hope that this review will enable readers to consider a range of views about this rather 'so what?' book.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rambling and long winded, 22 Jul 2008
I struggled to get through this novel. It took so long to get going and it never grabbed me. It's the story of Ida, a Jamaican girl who meets the actor Errol Flynn as a young girl and ends up having a daughter with him. Although the daughter May is the title character, she doesn't really come into the story until the second half of the book. The first part is all about how Ida meets Errol and eventually becomes his lover at the age of 16. The relationship doesn't last and Ida is left to raise her daughter on her own, although she does later marry.
The book is very slow - oddly so, because a lot happens, but the action parts are rushed and the parts between dragged out. The synopsis makes it sound so exciting: pirates' tales, hunting for lost treasure and appearances by stars like Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe. All I can say is while these things are mentioned, they are hardly major elements of the story. It's a book that is more character driven than plot driven: unfortunately the characters are not particularly likeable or even interesting.
Cezair-Thompson seems intimidated by the idea of incorporating Errol Flynn as a fictional character: he never feels real in the way that the other characters do. The idea of using a real person in a piece of fiction is far from new - for example, William Boyd does it very skillfully in "Any Human Heart". But here it feels clumsy and contrived.
Some of the dialogue is written in the Jamaican dialect. Reading other reviews, I guess I'm the minority here, but I found that distracting. It irritates me when I need to slow down my reading to decipher what is being said by sentences like: "Wha'fe you cyan be unfe you".
The one thing that I really loved about this book is the descriptions of Jamaica, which are gorgeous. You can almost smell the rain-scented forests, feel the tropical breezes, see the white bougainvillea fringing the colorfully painted houses. But overall, this book was a disappointment to me.
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