Customer Reviews: Read 37 more reviews...
 Painfully dull October 24, 2008
I read this in my book club at work and had fairly high hopes. If it wasn't for the fact that, as an English teacher, it would look fairly poor if I hadn't read the book, I would have put it down long before the end. I found the storyline dull, the writing style drab and the characters vapid and clichéd. They wouldn't have been out of place in your average mind-numbing soap opera. Quite how an author can get away with the slim, London-based, coke-sniffing girl who works in advertising and is sleeping with an older, married man is beyond me. I didn't find one of them rounded enough to actually cause me to care what happened to them; the only benefit of that being that a rather inconclusive ending failed to leave me unsatisfied where it might have if the story had been well-written.
Not even good for a light read in my opinion.
 Great Story! October 6, 2008
I just don't understand the negative reviews of this book. It's well-written with sharp characterisation (admittedly the teen/twenties argot is already a little dated - but then look at some of Dickens' dialogue!)of believable people who you really care about, and a story which dovetails the disappointments and minor tragedies of ordinary life with a very English sense of the need to (in Churchill's words) keep buggering on. Perhaps you need to be of a certain age and to have experienced a real disappointment in life to appreciate the attitudes of the older characters. Certainly some of the younger protagonists seem feckless and amoral, while some of the older ones seem twisted by fate, but (in the experience of this reviewer) that's life; that's how the generations see each other. I strongly urge anyone who wants a deeper understanding of life in post-Thatcher Britain to read this novel.
Promised but not achieved April 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We read this book in our book group, and the majority verdict was that it is a lazy, sometimes badly written book which fails to work out its themes with any conviction.In addition there were mistakes in punctuation and spelling which suggested sloppy editing. One or two readers found the dysfunctional Judd family realistic, but on the whole (for a variety of reasons) we were disappointed.
Spectacularly dull read. December 22, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
A set of bound, lifeless, middle class ramblings. Failed to connect with any of the characters and was genuinely shocked by this after the reviews were so good. I literally had to force myself to finish this and the ending was not at all worth the bother. Please, please don't waste your money.
boring October 22, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I really hated this book and found it completely dull and uninspiring. I find it hard to understand all its great reviews but I suppose if we were all the same, life would be boring.
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