Reviews tagging 'Infidelity'

Shrines of Gaiety by Kate Atkinson

2 reviews

znvisser's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

This was fun! Lots going on, many characters including intelligent dogs (love it), and then women and girls everywhere following their dreams and outsmarting men. Early on my brain made a Peaky Blinders comparison and honestly, I held on to it because it helped me with the setting as I don't recall having read a lot of fiction from this time period before. I was however a bit disappointed by Niven's character, who was introduced interestingly (e.g. as a relative outsider to his family, coming back from the war) but his character fell flat fast and these promises from the start didn't really get thoroughly explored. I do understand it's hard to have so many characters and have them all be layered and pronounced, but the author succeeded in this far better for the women (and policemen?) in this story. However, I am not going to complain any more about that, because we all know there are more than enough books out there where women are prone to this fate. I loved how the author used perspective changes and timelines to play with the reader's perspective. In part due to it, the plot wasn't as mysterious as the setting, with many easter eggs and predictable turns and events
, and a slightly unsurprising moral along the lines of "the bad people are not as bad as they seem, and certainly not as bad as the people who are supposed or appear to be doing better"
. But to me there was some playfulness to the predictability and I rather enjoyed it, moreover because I am not particularly looking to be misled in my reading. Anyway - fun! Might pick up some more historical fiction from this time period. 
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jesshindes's review

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dark funny mysterious medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

I have loved Kate Atkinson's books in the past (Life After Life and A God in Ruins are peak novel), although I was underwhelmed by Transcriptions, the spy novel that was the last of her works I read, which felt a bit tired and predictable. Shrines of Gaiety is better than that: it's set in the 1920s Soho underworld, building up its portrait of the period through a cast of characters including the criminal Coker family, the reforming Inspector Frobisher, aspiring starlet Freda Murgatroyd, and librarian Gwendolen Kelling, who plunges into the midst of all of them. Atkinson is great on period detail and good, too, at building character: even though there are a lot of people here to juggle, as the novel went on I got attached to a bunch of them. There were some lovely scenes and a good sense of building momentum and tension as the novel went on.

But... The pacing on this guy felt wildly off! It took a while to get going, which is okay, but just as it was getting really interesting, the relationships were becoming nicely complex, and a good tranche of mysteries were unfolding, it ended! I wasn't really ready to let go of the characters and it wasn't very clear to me why Atkinson decided to wrap it up (which she does very comprehensively) when she did. I think the book could have started later and gone past the ending point we're given, and been better for it. So, a mixed bag - I wouldn't have minded the abrupt ending as much if I hadn't been enjoying myself when it happened, after all.
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