This review includes spoilers, you've been forewarned.
A bit obvious, uneventful and a miss for me.
A bit obvious, uneventful and a miss for me.
As always this review is based on my experience of reading this book and not reflective of the actual content or story for a broader audience (I say because I'm not particularly glowing in my rating!).
If I had this on holiday then I may have warmed to it a little more. It definitely feels like the kind of book that doesn't require much thinking.
I found the twist "baddie" very obvious but at the same time lots of the story moved forwards without any real reason.
I came away from reading the book like it had been 100 pages or so. Maybe it's because I felt like the characters didn't have any depth - the sister Victoria is cruel and unkind to the protagonist Letty, but it seems for no reason other than to make a bad character (in the living world).
Then there's Walter, living in the afterlife (or the interim, or maybe even purgatory…), it's unclear why he's been there for so long - what was special about his name. He wrote a book of poem, god knows how many hundreds of years prior to the current day, so I'm not entirely sure why he doesn't pass on.
Later we meet Hector. I'm not sure how he's part of Walters "life". Maybe it was explained and I skimmed idly past it, or perhaps it's just some rando that has a larger part to play - and even then, when Hector plays his hand, he kind of just falls off the pages.
All in all, a bit of a miss for me.
3 Highlight(s)
No doubt the extra weight she'd piled on in the last few years hadn't helped, but she was fairly sure that age – not Mars bars and millionaires' shortbread – was the overwhelming culprit.
Letty laughed out loud. If she was going insane, at least this was an enjoyable way to do it.
'Love is not limited,' Pemberton said. 'It doesn't get spread out or worn thin. I learnt that there. I learnt that, if you love someone new, it doesn't make your love for anyone else weaker. You can't love too many people, Walter. But you can miss out by not loving enough.'