Helpful Score: 6
I will never trust another Lainey book review ever. Lui raved about this first novel by Sadie Jones and it is winner of the Costa Award and finalist for the Orange Broadband Prize (whatever that is) but I should have known better when I saw the blurb from Oprah's Magazine on the cover.
Anyways, this thing reeked of YA Fiction. It was sordid, there were heaving bosoms, there were no higher ideals or anything enriching or advancing, it was just romanticized hysteria and kind of a step by step how-to on the Art of Cutting.
The story is about a British boy named Lewis Aldridge who witnesses and never recovers from his mother's drowning when he is 10. Five months afterwards his insensitive father remarries, to a witless dingbat. The rest of the community fails Lewis also, and thus the title of the novel, The Outcast. I kept expecting there to be vampires and wolverines and Harry Potter Bella Robsten Hunger Game whatnot on every next page, it was hell for me to read.
Anyways, this thing reeked of YA Fiction. It was sordid, there were heaving bosoms, there were no higher ideals or anything enriching or advancing, it was just romanticized hysteria and kind of a step by step how-to on the Art of Cutting.
The story is about a British boy named Lewis Aldridge who witnesses and never recovers from his mother's drowning when he is 10. Five months afterwards his insensitive father remarries, to a witless dingbat. The rest of the community fails Lewis also, and thus the title of the novel, The Outcast. I kept expecting there to be vampires and wolverines and Harry Potter Bella Robsten Hunger Game whatnot on every next page, it was hell for me to read.
Helpful Score: 2
This is a very well-written book and holds one's interest to the very end. However, I found the story line quite depressing, and since I lived in U.K. at the time of the story I wonder if so much violence actually went on in people's lives. Who knows? It is not a book I would recommend for "light" reading.
