Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
89 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A little cluttered, though I'm still a big fan, 27 Aug 2008
I love Kate Atkinson's writing (I don't usually buy books in hardback!) and did enjoy this novel, finishing it in a matter of days.
However, I can't deny that it felt a little cluttered - too many perspectives; too many personal tragedies; too much drama and bloody violence. I felt that an awful lot had been packed in along the way and it began to feel unrealistic and unsubtle.
To my mind, the Needler story was unnecessary; Reggie's personal circumstances went from bad to unlikely; and all the key characters were a little too connected. A bit of coincidence is one thing, but this went too far. Perhaps it was meant to feel 'fateful' but it didn't quite work for me.
When writing from Jackson Brodie's perspective Kate Atkinson seems at her most comfortable, he's a rounded character and totally believable. For me, Reggie was endearing but didn't quite ring true and I am not at all keen on her new pet character, Louise Munroe. Not that it's vital to always like characters in novels, but she's clearly being established as a heroine, perhaps equal to Jackson, but for me she has few redeeming features. I simply don't want to know much more about her.
Given Kate Atkinson's talents as a writer (her colourful prose and characterisation draw the reader in from the very start) I feel she doesn't need to rely so heavily on crime as a genre. She built up her initial tale of the Mason family in a compelling way, only to destroy them a few pages later. It felt like a waste. I remember feeling the same way about Case Histories.
I look forward to her next novel but hope she tones down the crime elements just a little and focuses on her characters and insights into their lives and loves.
|
|
|
58 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.", 26 Sep 2008
Not a traditional mystery, Kate Atkinson's third Jackson Brodie novel grows instead out of the terrible traumas that children and young people must endure when people they love die violently. So marked are they by their sudden tragedies, that they never really escape their pasts, and spend the rest of their lives wondering "when will there be good news." Five separate plot lines evolve and begin to overlap here, and in each of these plots the main characters are all needy people hiding an inner loneliness from which they would like to escape. In the first plot, Joanna Mason Hunter is a physician living in Edinburgh, the happily married mother of a one-year-old, a woman who appears to have it all, but thirty years ago, she escaped a slashing attack which murdered her mother, sister, and baby brother. Though she seems to have put her past to rest, the murderer of her family is about to be released from jail.
Joanna's "mother's help" is Reggie Chase, a sixteen-year-old fending for herself in a rundown apartment that she shares with her delinquent brother. Reggie adores her job--and Joanna, who has no idea that Reggie's mother has died traumatically over a year ago. Jackson Brodie, a former police detective and a lead character in Case Histories: A Novel and One Good Turn: A Jolly Murder Mystery, is newly married for the third time, estranged from his twelve-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and prohibited from seeing the two-year-old he believes to be his son with his former girlfriend.
While working on a case in England, he takes the wrong train and ends up in Edinburgh, where he is injured in a train crash near the house where babysitter Reggie Chase is staying. Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, a former girlfriend of Jackson Brodie, has come to Edinburgh to warn Joanna that the killer of her family has been released. In a final subplot, Joanna's husband Neil Hunter is in debt and in trouble with criminals, and Reggie, the babysitter, has found the house empty when she arrived to babysit. She is convinced that Joanna and the baby are missing and probably dead.
Atkinson's narrative is enhanced by her skillful pacing as she introduces new elements and surprises, and she is especially adept at individualizing her characters. Through flashbacks, she compares and contrasts their past and present lives, and the reader comes to "know" them. Connected thematically by their yearning for loving relationships, they are eventually connected through the plot's complications and mysteries. Ironies abound, and mistaken identities create some bizarre and sometimes darkly humorous scenes. Coincidence plays an important role in resolving the novel in dramatic fashion, and though no one will believe that these twists and turns are remotely realistic, they are great fun and completely consistent with the ebullient story-telling that Atkinson has made her signature. Mary Whipple
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Human Croquet
Emotionally Weird
Not the End of the World
Abandonment
|
|
|
78 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Serious Story Strands Satisfy, 11 Aug 2008
Wow - A feast of words, a tale presented on so many levels and complete with even some gritty jokes. Latin lover Reggie (Regina) grabs your sympathy with her understated bravery and Jo teaches us how to overcome the worst of hands that life can deal. The cast members from previous books knit into the story cleverly and realistically. Surprises pop up around every corner with really good honest characters to be found struggling with them. Philosophical trains of thought mingle with exciting adventures, all bound together in the best possible writing. A truly great book that will give pleasure to all who come across it. Kate Atkinson just gets better and better.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
by David Ebershoff
by Kate Atkinson
by Kate Atkinson
by Beatrice Colin
