"You won't find Dickens, California, on the map, because about five years after my father died, and a year after I graduated college, it, too, perished"
So I finished this year's Booker Prize winner with considerable speed; to be fair, I was stuck at the hairdressers for a few hours today (I'm not naturally blonde). This is another somewhat problematic read and I'm struggling somewhat to piece my thoughts together about it.
I read someone else's review that it is difficult to digest a novel's worth of satire and I think perhaps that is because it becomes a little intense. However, it you feel there's some significant injustice done to you in your life and you choose to use humour to tackle it, you could understand why it make take quite a few pages to really let fly.
This is also not your typical plot driven novel and to discuss it in those terms would be a little pointless.I certainly had some laugh out loud moments, some awkward in my seat moments, some slightly guilty moments and then a few lost in the wilderness moments. If you take that into consideration, you can clearly see that this is much more than mindless entertainment and that my attempts to come to grips with it are indicative of something special, a book that makes you think. Isn't that the best kind of fiction?
4 out of 5 what the Dickens?
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