"Small Worlds" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

An audio book.

London. Steve, the first-person protagonist, is in the last week of school, soon to go to university. He plays trumpet in a jazz group with Adeline (Del) sometimes. He has an older brother Raymond. His parents came from Ghana. He's interested in his parents' past. In particular he'd like to know how his father coped with being 18.

His grades aren't as good as expected. He does business studies at Nottingham while Del does music in London. He gives up after a term, goes home. His brother moves out, having got his girlfriend pregnant. His father chucks him out because he's a disappointment to the family. He trains to be a chef. He likes Annie, likes who he is with her - open, vulnerable - but she goes to Brazil. Del and Steve meet again, admitting to love each other. She gave up music college because she wasn't learning anything. His mother dies of a heart attack. They'd been planning to go to Ghana together. He goes anyway, finds out more about his mother's early life, gets drunk.

Ray teaches him how to drive, saying that he thinks their father's struggling. Steve hasn't seen his father for a year, not since the funeral. He tried to make up. He goes through his father's old records. He wants to know how to choose what to remember.

At the end, "you" (his father) tells of the struggles in `1986 London. Prejudice, poverty and love.

He prefers "small worlds" - being with one person. The voice is poetic in the way that an 18 year old's might be. "light" triggers phrases like the repeated "we find a way to walk in the light they left behind" (of the dead). "space" (the word or concept) is added to many otherwise straightforward phrases to replace "moment", etc - "into that space where", "the way desire might spill into the space", "somewhere between content and melancholy", etc. Other examples of imagery and poetical phrasing include -

• "Del's lips hold a brief home on my cheeks and we pull each other close. We give no goodbyes, we know death in its multitudes"
• "It's funny what you remember, what palaces you make to store the fragments"
• "I am the beach disappeared by the tide, I am the breath between two notes"
• "the way thunder asks you to check the sky for rain"
• "June veers towards July"
• "light clasps onto her neck"
• "shyness visits upon us"
• "it was the time of day when the sun was leaving the sky"

At times I find it too lush, but maybe that's the point. However, the vocabulary is elevated too - he uses words like "discern" - and he's aware that he sometimes "mirrors" people's gestures.

Other reviews

• Colin Grant (Small Worlds is determinedly not another rehearsal of the kind of voyeuristic tabloid interest in Black people’s lives marked by violence and social deprivation; rather, it’s a love story. At least it sets out that way ... The novel would also benefit from a more generous inclusion of the rich hybrid of London/Ghanaian vernacular. One of the challenges Nelson wrestles with is how to make soap opera-ish everyday dialogue support the narrator’s intimation of the characters’ sophisticated interior lives ... Other pivotal scenes [] are bolted on, and read like a shortcut towards unearned gravitas. In a novel told in three sections, not only is there a mystifying shift in register from a gentle love story in part one to the opening of part two, [] but the narrator’s reflections on the ensuing conflagrations, though sincere [] are unconvincing.)
• jacquiwine (I also love how Azumah Nelson uses repetition throughout the novel ... A great example of this is the relationship between remembering and forgetting. At times, we want to forget things because they feel painful (e.g. ‘Right now, I don’t want to remember. I only want to forget’), while at other times, the emphasis shifts to remembering because we want something to endure (e.g. ‘Sure you’ll remember me?’ […] ‘How could I forget’). Other themes that Azumah Nelson continues to revisit include: the link between solitude and loneliness, which ultimately feeds depression; the sense of feeling trapped between a desire to cry and the inability to do so; and the need to ‘lean into’ life’s uncertainties, especially to access new possibilities.)
• Liz Dexter

"The House of Broken Bricks" by Fiona Williams

An audio book.

It's autumn. Tess, brought up in Lewisham of Jamaican ancestry, black, with an Architecture degree, is married to Richard (white, a small-scale farmer), who tempted her to live in the English village he was born in. Now she hates it. They argue a lot. They have twins, 10. Max is white and Sonny is black. Sonny, the only black in the school, is popular. Max, for reasons we're not initially told, needs counselling. He has identity issues - a section ends with Tess reading an illustrated bedtime book to him and he thinks "The last thing I remember is seeing Tom, completely covered in soot, frightened by the face looking back at him in the mirror.". Once a week Tess visits Cyril down the road. He has a terminal disease. Their boat, Bernadette, is kept by Cyril's jetty. Tess doesn't want to be reminded of it. Floods last for 3 weeks. Richard drinks and has unexplained absences.

They have a subdued Xmas. [Ah, I'm beginning to think that Sonny is dead. Max uses "we", and sees/hears Sonny. Tess reacts to what Max says Sonny's doing.] Tess and Max visit Tess's mother in London. Tess's older sister Peaches is there, with her son Nathan. Tess's mother, a widow, says she's going to sell up and move to Jamaica. Peaches tries to set Tess up with David. David gets her a job. She finds a place for Max for the next year in a London school. When they return home, Tess discovers she's pregnant - a forgotten drunken night with Richard. She keeps it secret. Sonny senses the foetus. Sonny says "I died on a summer's day" - a boating accident. Cyril dies. When villagers see that Tess is pregnant they see it as sign that Tess and Richard have got over their problems. Tess changes her mind about moving with Max to London.

Richard's been secretly preparing a polytunnel in their garden, with Jamaican plants and parakeets (naturalised, not foreigners). It's for her. And Cyril's left them money. Maybe it'll all work out.

Sections are from the 4 main characters' PoVs (Richard 3rd-person, the rest 1st). The boys (Sonny in particular) are thoughtful, observant, and poetic. They discuss their parents' relationship. It's not that the author is describing in adult language the insights and feelings that 10 year-olds have. They think and feel like adults even though they don't behave like them - "gossamer", "my quiet feet follow the rhythm of silence", "her voice sinks into me", "till darkness spilt". The status of Sonny is hinted at several times before it's revealed. I think Tess changes her mind/emotions too easily at the end.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt (an elderly lady tells 10-year-old Max Hembry that the broken bricks employed to build his family’s cottage were also used as ballast at sea, “to weigh down them clipper ships sent to collect sugar from the Caribbean … yes, where your nana and grandad came from”. The symbolism could not be more explicit: that which appears damaged can, from a different perspective, offer stability.)
• aminasbookshelf (the standout element of this novel is how delicately she treats the themes. ... At times, I also wanted Tess and Richard to just split up and get a divorce, because it started to feel a tad repetitive. However, there were enough plot escalations to keep me interested)
• Gannah Elsoul (There is a childhood innocence to the children’s chapters, an overriding feeling anxiety in Tessa’s chapters, and a sense of isolation in Richard’s chapters. ... The story’s only weak point is that it becomes a little too repetitive, as the reader becomes the onlooker of a growing rift in Tessa and Richard’s marriage and parenthood. Although we root for some productive communication and intimacy between the married couple, the placid hum of their detachment continues)

"Choice" by Neel Mukherjee

An audio book in 3 parts.

Ayush (responsible for publishing literary books) and Luke (an economics lecturer) are a gay couple who've been together 20 years. They have Thai twins aged 8. Arguments about who does what at home become arguments about the significance of their professions. They analyse using the skills of their professions. Ayush feels he's the token diversity person at work. He gets an author's book of short stories accepted, but the author Emen Ohpee refuses to reveal anything about themselves. The book flops. Ayush shows the children a video of animals being slaughtered, hoping to make the children vegetarian. Luke eats meat. Ayush is obsessive about being green. Luke thinks that market forces should be made to work. Ayush tries to teach the twins about similies. He discusses with the children about how they can have 2 dads - do children at school comment on this? Without telling Luke, Ayush has taken £200k from the twins' education fund and giving it to charity. Luke is furious at first, then quickly forgives - he can soon recover the money by doing consultancy work. He wonders why Ayush is worked up by so many little things. Perhaps, he says to Ayush, there's one big thing that's behind it all - their relationship.

Emily, an academic, gets an Uber from a party. The driver is careless. He seems to knock over a child plus a dog. Next day the driver, Saleem, starts talking to her on the street. In bad English he says that he was driving, uninsured, to replace his brother who was badly ill. She wonders whether she had false memories of the ride. Then reports appear. She asks her friend Rohan (who teaches creative writing) whether she should report the hit-and-run to the police. She asks a colleague about Uber's business model. She has meetings with Saleem. He's a refugee from Eritrea by way of Sudan, Libya, Italy, etc. She accepts an invitation to visit his brother while he's having dialysis in hospital. She donates a kidney to Saleem's brother. She decides to do some creative writing. She shows Rohan her work. He's initially angry/jealous that she's so involved with this man - is she sleeping with him? They discuss the story's technicalities, whether it's fact or fiction [A story like this one is briefly mentioned in the first section - it's in the short story collection]

A family in a village 20 miles from the nearest road await visitors. They are given a cow by a charity. The husband is away for weeks at a time. The mother works as a maid 2 hours away. They don't eat cows, though people beyond the nearby border do. They have to find food for it. Neighbours are jealous and suspicious. The mother, Sabita, makes her 2 young children give up school (which wasn't much anyway - we're told about it) to look after the cow. The charity people from town come to check how things are progressing. The mother beats the children because they can't look after the cow (which eats a neighbour's banana tree). We briefly get the cow's PoV. The people from town give her supplies, information, and a mobile phone (so they can forewarn her of visits). Sabita has no electricity. She can't even afford a bucket. She wants money. They get the cow pregnant. Sabita's 8 year-old daughter takes over the housemaid role, becoming a live-in maid. They try to find customers for the milk, working out what to do with the surplus. The husband returns, taking the cow away to sell but he's killed and the cow stolen. [A story like this one is briefly mentioned in the first section - an episode in a book about third world economics]

There are longuers in every piece, points hammered home regarding tokenism, acting local and thinking global, economics vs emotion. The first story springs the surprise of the £200k donation, the second has the bigger shock of the kidney donation. The third begins with the surprise of the cow gift, then the phone. The final story's plot has few surprises - it's all downhill, with details. I don't think it justifies its length, but I've the same doubt about all the parts.

Other reviews

• Tanjil Rashid
• Abhrajyoti Chakraborty (Choice is undone by its third section ... For the first time in the novel, nuance is eschewed for a preachy, threadbare morality. When read after the two stories set in London, Sabita’s saga of unmitigated woe leaves you with a distressing question. Does Mukherjee really think the poor, and those living in the global south, have no inner lives to speak of?)
• Tabish Khair (While “choice” connects all three parts—they are numbered, not titled—of the book, there is nothing else in common between them, except the stony backdrop of “economics” and some slight echoes, the latter especially between I and II. Despite this, I incline towards the “novel” designation as the three parts are held together by a fierce act of concentration on the matter of choice.)
• Sanjay Sipahimalani (Do the three strings of Choice vibrate when placed next to each other, creating something more than the sum of their parts? Up to a point, certainly. ... However, the prose sometimes becomes overly didactic, especially in the first two sections. ... It ought to be pointed out that Mukherjee does try to pre-empt such criticism.)

"Lisbon poets" (shantarin, 2023)

A bilingual edition of poems by Luís de Camões (born 1524), Cesário Verde (born 1855), Mário de Sá-Carneiro (born 1890), Florbela Espanca (born 1894), and Fernando Pessoa (born 1888, writing as Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Capos and himself).

According to his introduction, Luís de Camões is "considered to be Portugal's national poet ... equal in status to Renaissance peers like Shakespeare and Dante".

Mário de Sá-Carneiro killed himself at 25. One of his poems ends with "A little more sunshine - and I would have been ember,/ a little more blue - and I would have taken flight,/ But I lacked that impulse to get there .../ If only I had remained where I was ..."

Florbela Espanca killed herself at 36. Her mother was a 15 y.o. housemaid when her boss made her pregnant. Espanca studied law - she was one of 7 female students at the university. She had 2 divorces and several miscarriages.

I struggled with most of these poems. My favourite poet of the bunch is Ricardo Reis, one of the Pessoa personae.

"The black crescent" by Jane Johnson

An audio book.

1939 - Hammu, a Berber boy in a Moroccan village, is being visited by his younger cousin Mohar, 8, from Casablanca. 1955 - Hammu is now a policeman in Casablanca, working for the French. He has a strong sense of justice. He fancies Zeema. The Sultan has been deposed. Mohar is now boss of an international company. Hammu's offered promotion if he trains to use a gun. Off-duty, he gets caught up in a protest march. He saves a boy and takes him to his home. His mother, Aysha, is a whore. Hammu's polite to a client who's leaving. A charlatan, reading his palm, says that he's half Djinn. Hammu feels that he belongs to 2 worlds - not Djinn and human, but French and Moroccan. He discovers that Zeema carries guns for the rebels (the black crescent group), and that Mohar's company is in the police files, suspected of dealing in arms and drugs. Mohar's shot by the police. When Hammu confronts Zeema he discovers that she carries a cyanide pill in case she's interrogated. He sees the torture cells, hears someone being tortured to death. He feels increasingly mistrusted by Moroccans. He drops his gun rather than firing on Moroccans. His superior shoots him, but he's saved by his grandmother's metal amulet he was carrying. He's arrested, theatened with torture. Zeema, with the help of Aysha's client (an American who's influential), gets him out.

After a 17 hour bus trip he's back in his town with a job as a mediator - between locals (who try to bribe him) but also between the locals and French authority. He wonders if he's supposed to be an informer for the French. He deals with a range of citizens' complaints as fairly as he can - wife complains about her husband's performance in bed; someone complains that the old public assassin (who tells Hammu that his father was a gun-trader) didn't do what he was paid for. For successfully water-divining, he gets electricity put into his mother's house for free. His mother tries to get him married. A Frenchman is shot during a hunt. An accident? He suspects the public assassin. He discovers that Aysha, his niece, is with her. Aysha explains to him that the Frenchman tried to sleep with her when she was 11 then killed her mother. She thanks him for his help. She's excited about her future - France or America. He asks her mother if his father had really died in a car crash. She admits that he was shot by the French while delivering a cargo of guns. He wonders how she put up with him working for the French.

At the end, Morocco gains independence. Zeema arrives, still single, "an enigmatic smile curving her lips into a sweet crescent moon"

A tidy plot, and there weren't too many authentic details.

Other reviews

• Carol McGrath (Like his cat, he has many encounters with death and survives)
• whatcathyreadnext (The strong sense of community in which ties of blood are of particular importance is exemplified by Hamou’s family. But there is also a sense of change in the air, a transition from old ways to more modern ways, with some things lost in the process but others gained.)
• shereadsnovels (The book did feel very slow-paced and took much longer to read than I’d expected based on the length, but it held my interest throughout and I learned a lot from it)
• endsoftheword (The story, in fact, feels particularly authentic, and reading it is an immersive experience in a specific culture at a time of upheaval. ... On the other hand, I also had some reservations. First of all, I could not help feeling that the novel is slightly overlong ... What bothered me most, however, was the fact that the third-person narrative voice is not particularly distinctive. It certainly meets it purpose especially in the descriptive passages, but can at other times feel detached and rather bland.)

"Desperate Remedies" by Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone (ed) (Apis Books, 2008)

An anthology of stories from writers involved with "Tales of the Decongested" - a London short-story group.

Paul Blaney - concept stories (like Adam Marek?)

• "Facsimile" (Paul Blaney) - When he and his wife arrived at an airport 20 years before to start a new life, they decided not to speak their native tongue. They left a suitcase of memorabilia there - her decision. He's hardly dreamed since. He goes to an auction of left luggage and brings home a suitcase. A painting's in it - a landscape that he likes and she doesn't. One days she burns the painting and suitcase. She doesn't know who he is. She speaks only in their native tongue. He starts painting again - "A landscape that's not home and yet looks like home"
• "Cake" (Paul Blaney) - Less than 4 pages. A woman tells her that there are 2 types of people - those who have affairs and those who don't. Her brother has frequent affairs. She tries a one-night stand as an experiment, and guiltily tells her husband. She decides she's the non-affair type and her brother isn't - "he likes to have his cake and eat it. Me, I don't even get to finish my own slice"
• "Up, up and away" (Paul Blaney) - A few people each day float up into the always clear sky and disappear. There are no deaths among these left behind. A weatherwoman arranges a park gathering where everybody holds hands for hours until it starts raining. After that, nobody floats away. People start dying again.
• "Not alone" (Paul Blaney) - A man's employed by a dead man's sister to sort out his room above a pub. He finds that he's adopting the dead man's habits. He moves into the room, wears the man's clothes. He wants to find the man's journals so that he can learn more about him, then realises that living the dead man's life is the best way to learn. At the end he thinks "Sometimes, in order to see yourself clearly, you have to move away for a short spell from where you are. It was time to head for home"

Adam Elston - Long-term regret

• "Letting go" (Adam Elston) - 4 pages. After taking his water-fearing 4 year-old son Max swimming on Sunday (a recent habit), he drives Max home, not leaving the car. He sees his ex-to-be Julie at the door, and doubts again whether they're doing the right thing.
• "An old flame" (Adam Elston) - Browsing the web, Michael (with wife and child) sees that Sara (who he's not seen for 15 years) is selling a wedding dress. He contacts her and they decide to meet at the airport - she's passing through. He'd lived with her, broken up, then had gone to her again, and had left again because she was unfaithful. He feels old, boring and fat now. When he catches sight of her at the airport, she hasn't changed. Maybe it'll work this time.
• "Kite" (Adam Elston) - David (a retired philosophy lecturer) and wife Jennifer fly a kite to commemorate the death of their only child, Daniel, who died 16 years before, aged 9, on his bike. At 5 he'd survived meningitis. The kite comes loose and blows away.

Mark Saba - an episodic family saga where a lot's going on. Interesting. I didn't need the further complication of having to guess when events happened. More time-stamps?

• "Thaddeus Olsen" (Mark Saba) - 100 pages - much the longest piece. Thaddeus (Tad) lives in the US. He has Polish and native indian roots. He likes making connections. In text which bounces back (to 1672 and Cambridge, UK) and forth in time we learn that he married Juliana, spent 5 years searching for his father Ron Olsen, wondered why his grandfather (aka Lightheart) was hung. He has uncles Dan and Frank (a plumber who drinks, who drowns in a boating accident). After not talking to Dan for 15 years, Tad tracks him down. He runs a casino, and is interested in native rights. Tad works at Staehl University in IT. There's an explosion at Staehl, and it's discovered that the university's built on ancient burial grounds. Then the provost is shot dead. At the end there's a summary and conclusion - "Tad ... will simply expire while looking at the view: the same in all directions, limitless, or horizon with no story to tell: everyone's"

M L Stedman - remembrance of lost love

• "Homesickness" (M L Stedman) - Australia. Tim and schoolfriends visit the deli/sweetshop run by sweaty, Yugoslavian Stanko, stealing sweets. Then a beautiful girl - Stanko's daughter - starts working there, and Tim falls in love. She can't speak english. Frank (son of a publican) is disrespectful to her, which angers Tim. Then Frank rapes her. The police are powerless - her word against his. Before long, Stanko and his daughter move away. Tim thumps Frank. At the end "There was this weird pain inside me somewhere, like I imagined homesickness must feel: like there was a place I could never go back to"
• "Momento Mori" (M L Stedman) - A male antique shop owner lures a schoolgirl into the back room and kills her, burying her body onsite, keeping a lock of her hair. 25 years later, the shop long sold, the body is found when the site is redeveloped. [Can't see much in this]
• "Dot and Ben" (M L Stedman) - Ben saw Dotty Dot about 20 times over 50 years, first when a boy, fishing with his father on the beach where she wandered, a bit mad. She told him that a Ben used to love her. Benedict. She asked if he loved anybody, and warned him about love. When his father died, he visited the beach again. He married Jess, became a doctor in a city, had a son, Dan. When Dan was 18, Jess died in a traffic accident and Dan was seriously brain-damaged. Ben moved near the beach with Dan, working in the hospital. He takes Dan to the beach and they meet Dot. Later, Dot is brought into hospital. He looks up her records and finds a love letter from Ben to Dot - a photo too. She dies.

Guy Ware - a mix of large scale life-sized plot with lots of small-scale chance events. Good dialogue

• "The long run" (Guy Ware) - London. Young Steve's looking after his ill, old father's dealership. Old Ray arrives. We get both their PoVs as they size each other up. Ray test drives a Daimler with Steve (who can't drive) beside him. He drives all night - Cambridge, M25, Portsmouth. They pick up Joy, a young, confused girl who says she's going to be an architect. They breakfast in Bexhill. Ray buys Steve's company and drives away. [works for me!]
• "Asking for it" (Guy Ware) - Max (married with 2 young kids) works for the PM (Tony Blair), organising events often at short notice. His wife Eileen (who works at A&E) had once punched him and broken his nose. He finds himself in a pub with a Felicity, a young, new reporter. A stranger alludes that she's black. Max gives her a lift home, returns to the pub as if looking for trouble, then goes home. On New Year's Eve he's looking after the kids while Eileen's working. He pops out to the pub and ends up in A&E. Eileen's had enough of his self-harming tactics.

Shaun Levin - episodic CNF

• "Specimens of desperate attempts: sketches from the life and death of Isaac Rosenberg" (Shaun Levin) - "Some of us, all we get is birth and death. Others get at least one more moment like this. When the arms of eternity open just for us ... The Slade, South Africa, London, the war. Never happy, never at ease, never welcome. But he didn't know this"

"Five Survive" by Holly Jackson

6 17/18 year olds are in an RV on the way to a week of camping. Red (female) and Arthur are in the early stages of friendship. Red and Maddy are lifelong friends. Maddy and Oliver are siblings. Raynor is driving. Oliver's her boyfriend. Simon is there too. A sniper starts shooting at them, bursting the types and hitting the fuel tank. Oliver takes control.

Red's dad's a drinker. Her mother (police) died - shot in an abandoned power station. Oliver and Maddy's mother is a deputy DA currently prosecuting a gangster leader, Frank, for murder. Perhaps the sniper wants to know who the key eye-witness is.

The sniper leaves them a walkie-talkie. He says that one of them has a secret. Once that person comes forward, the others will be saved. Oliver admits that when a man accosted Raynor, he hit him and he died. Raynor tells Oliver that it wasn't a random man. It was a man she was having an affair with.

They think up escape plans. They fail. 2 curious people who live nearby ask if they want help. They're shot dead. The sniper seems to know what's going on inside the RV. Oliver gets the others to look for a hidden microphone, then suspects that one of them is a wired-up mole. "Lord of the Flies" is mentioned.

Then Red says that she's the key witness, that she's had several meetings with Oliver's mother. Should she give herself up to the sniper? They anonymously vote on it. Though the majority say no, she walks out. She's not shot. Oliver decides that since Red is immune she's guilty. He gets Maddy to dress in Red's clothes so she can go out and drive away in the dead couple's vehicle. She goes out and is shot in the leg - wounded but not dead. Just as Red manages to contact someone on a walkie-talkie channel, Arthur takes the walkie-talkie from her and smashes it. He's Frank's son. He wants to know who's framing his father. Red says that Oliver's mother is paying her to be a witness. Arthur says she's been exchanging info with the gang for 10 years. She made Red think that Frank's gang killed her mother. Red realises that Oliver's mother killed her mother (who'd realised what Oliver's mother was up to), and that Maddy had known what had happened.

The cops arrive. Red is shot by the police. She imagines talking to her mother. Oliver dies.

It ends with a police transcript and a news item about the murder of Oliver's mother. Arthur sent Red a letter saying that Arthur had killed her. Red survives. Arthur gives her money to pay the health fees.

The reviews say this is YA. I like "the flat tyre unpuddles off the ground" (when it's pumped up) and "her head undone" (of a woman who'd been shot in the head) but not "into two unequal halves"

Other reviews

• missknown (A small group of people trapped and only the secret of one of them can set them free isn’t a new concept. It’s always a fun story for the drama and the usual fast pace. It’s a type of story that will keep you on the edge of your seat. And Five Survive was no different. Although of all the stories I’ve seen with this plot, this one is my least favourite. ... In the end, they all had some sort of secret, except ones were insignificant compared to others. This also meant the characters didn’t equally share the suspects’ pool, which defies one of the core purposes of the mystery. ... But the ending… It wasn’t satisfying. There’s a lot of injustice behind the secret the sniper is after, and while it’s resolved, it’s not resolved satisfyingly. I felt there was so much wrongness that wasn’t righted. And so I much prefer the journey even if it wasn’t perfect. But the ending… It wasn’t satisfying. There’s a lot of injustice behind the secret the sniper is after, and while it’s resolved, it’s not resolved satisfyingly. I felt there was so much wrongness that wasn’t righted. And so I much prefer the journey even if it wasn’t perfect.)
• thewrittenvoiceofis (I wasn’t fully invested until 60 percent of the book. ... It drags in places (those early 60 percent pages could have been edited to fewer escape descriptions), and not all six characters bring much to the table, and honestly, Jackson could have gone and been wilder with the twist. Until then, I thought Holly Jackson’s new venture into thriller was rather lackluster.)
• frappesandfiction (Holly Jackson knows how to write a page-turner for sure. However, my main issues with the book were the flat characters and lack of realism. ... There were a lot of awkwardly-worded sentences, as well as odd sentence placement and scene transitions.)