pkc's reviews
391 reviews

This is a tough book to try and condense into a few words for a review. The story follows a cast of characters, each unique and uniquely identifiable, but linked by Evelyn Skinner and Ulysses Temper, who fatefully meet in Florence in 1944 as the Second World War rages across Europe. 

Ulysses takes on the bulk of the narrative as characters weave in and out of his orbit, cementing themselves as friends and drawing from his wellspring of goodness as quickly as he can expel it. As a protagonist, the only word I can think of is gorgeous. He exudes kindness, complexity, grace, and beauty and his helpful nature is inherent throughout the novel. 

I really don’t want to say too much because I could probably write an essay and I don’t want to do that. I will say that there is a parrot called Claude and I feel that our perspective as reader is similar to Claude’s perspective. We observe, we are moved by events but mostly, we drift through the story, pitching and sailing on the breeze through 22 years (plus 28 days in 1901…) of the lives of these remarkable human beings as the world changes around them. 

It’s not the easiest read in the world. Like the truest of artists, Winman doesn’t baby the reader in any way, but the effect and impact of her prose is dizzying and rich, like a beautiful vino rosso. I dog-eared a few pages with beautiful quotes, but realistically you could just open the book and point to a line and it will no doubt be beautiful. Ugh. What a reading experience!

It’s interesting to read a book like this that’s effectively a slice of history from the perspective of those who were unlucky enough to live through and be directly affected by it. In this instance, the gross indecency act of 1885 is almost a tertiary watchman. It casts a pall across any happiness and opportunity that the characters in the book might hope to one day enjoy. The result is egregious bigotry, secrecy, and lies. The story follows Marion who meets her eponymous policeman - Tom, the brother of her best friend and falls instantly for him. Their relationship is complicated by the policeman’s relationship with Patrick - a museum curator. Their arrangement is uneasy and rocky and in the end can only lead to tragedy. 

The story vacillates between Marion’s and Patrick’s perspective: the former reflecting on the events of her tumultuous marriage from the relative safety of 1999, while the latter’s perspective is told in the form of extensive diaries. The perspectives are beautifully woven together as events start to derail. I loved how Tom’s story was never told from his own perspective. It gives him the same air of unknowability that each narrator would experience as he retreated into his respective “other life.” Bethan Roberts’ writing is so skilled though that he is no less formed or sympathetic by the omission of his direct perspective 

I found myself throughout abhorring the decisions made by the characters and felt anger throughout but ultimately, pity. The bulk of the story takes place in the late 1950s in Brighton, and while Brighton now proudly owns its title as the queer capital of Britain, at the time, it was as backwards as the rest of the country in its attitudes towards queer people, or “inverts”. The characters are placed in impossible decisions and face untenable quandaries in their pursuit of a happy and authentic life, wrestling between the ideal and the expected path.

This was an easy 5⭐️ and I’d recommend it to anyone. Some caution though, by its very nature it’s super bleak and infuriating from a 2024 vantage point.

Frightfully bleak. I really enjoyed this book overall, it was a wild plot but the explanation was so bleak, it felt hard to reconcile with how I enjoyed the rest of the book and dragged the rating down for me sadly 

I’ve had this book a while and it didn’t disappoint in any way. The story was engaging, the prose was exquisite and the characters were so brilliantly realised. I thought the ending was mind blowing and when I initially finished, I couldn’t quite process what I’d just read. But a bit of reflection and I absolutely got it. Jennifer Saint needs all the pats on the back and accolades for this book! Can’t wait to read more of her work.

This is a tough one to try and review. On one hand, it had most of the traits, tropes and archetypes I’ve come to expect from a King novel, but on the other…it had most of the traits, tropes and archetypes I’ve come to expect from a King novel. This just wasn’t the place for them and as such, I’d be hard pressed to recommend this in good conscience to anyone. However, overall, this was an engaging novel with more than a little air punching from me by the end.

The plot concerns Rose Daniels, nee McLendon as she is impelled by a drop of blood in her bed to flee her abusive marriage, and she does so, armed with her husband’s bank card. However, her husband, a policeman, doesn’t take this well at all and pursues her across hundreds of miles and the boundaries of reality and unreality. It’s the unreality part where my feelers started to go off. The descriptions of the abuse that Rose suffers are gratuitous at best, and as ever, King pulls no punches. I just felt that with the subject matter, it really didn’t sit right with me as I read. I also felt that as the story started to explore more of the fantastical elements (yes you read that right) the abuse was almost a conduit to an expansion of his other mythology and the main story just managed to resolve and make sense by the end. Kind of. I’m not convinced though.

Norman, her husband, as a character was so brashly written and there was no nuance. It seemed like there were attempts at giving his behaviour over to some unspoken mental illness or neurological problem. I’m pretty sure if you can think of any pejorative word against a marginalised person, Norman used it at some stage. He read as a pathetic chauvinistic bigot, which he was in so many ways, but his brute strength and apparent ability to evade consequence gave him an otherworldly slant that felt like too much credit.

Rosie as a character was probably the best realised character in the book and while she made some odd choices in the way she spoke to people (her tone was indecipherable at points) she was ultimately successful as the complex heroine and the fantastical elements worked best as they pertained to the founding of her new life. Special credit also to Bill Steiner who was a gorgeous romantic core, a calm port in really choppy seas.

All in all, to try and sum this up, I enjoyed this book, but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone. It’ll be 30 years old next year and I’d say it’s showing its age quite a bit. It feels like the last bastion of a certain era of King’s oeuvre. I adore his work, and I know that he has distanced himself from this book in the intervening years - it’s easy to see why. The three stars come purely from the hopefulness I experienced for Rosie and how the unreality and reality married together in the end.

I think the main thing that kept me from truly loving this book was the hype train that accompanied and also the glaring communist allegory. The ending gave me chills though. Orwell has the deft ability to bring the reader out in a full body shiver with some of his choices. The last paragraph is stunning.

This was such a bizarre book and I thiiiiink I get what it was going for. However, if you’re picking it up and thinking “ooh look a small murder mystery” it’s much more and I don’t know if I’d consider it a spoiler to say there’s no neat resolution. There are a ton of hints that suggest what has likely happened but no resolution per se. Vesta as a main character was fascinating but -

her actions strike me as being the actions of someone who is aging and trying to make sense of a traumatic life with a loathsome man as her mind fragments from age and trauma

This is the third Otessa Moshfegh book I’ve read and as with her previous books, it was wholly unlike anything else I’ve read.