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melissa__w's review against another edition
1.0
I loved Life After Life, so I bought this one to read, but I just really didn't like it. It almost seems like it was a practice run for Life After Life, but not done nearly as well. And the multiple instances of father-daughter incest were quite unexpected....
michellel123's review against another edition
2.0
I read this on the recommendation of someone I trust (and it had heaps of great reviews), but it just wasn't for me. The words magical post-realism on the front cover should have been enough of a hint for me. I don't like fantasy, and I don't like being confused. Isobel Fairfax is a teenager who is able to time travel, and lives multiple versions of the same day. She and her brother Charles are brought up by a crabby old aunt after her mother and father both disappear and her grandmother dies. There is a substantial backstory about the history of the Fairfaxes, a once wealthy noble family, and children who are borrowed/adopted/left behind. I didn't really enjoy it all until the multiple livings of the Christmas Day, and it did wrap up nicely enough by the end, but I was still left a bit confused about what was real. I'm sure it was clever, artful and well-crafted, but not for me.
tonyriver's review against another edition
4.0
More strange and interesting events from Kate Atkinson. You always get the unexpected and bizarre and have your senses challenged when she is behind the pen!
katdid's review against another edition
3.0
This was fine -- it made me laugh out loud, which is typical of Kate Atkinson, but the book-ends to the narrative didn't really work for me. Plus
Spoiler
it uses maybe THE worst literary device around: "s/he woke up and it was all a dream", which would usually make me hurl a book away in disgust but in this case I think I ploughed through in denial and convinced my brain it was just part of the general magic realism/unreliable narrator thing that was going on. One thing I really liked was how all the obvious clues to the domestic violence next door was swept away with one line like (paraphrasing), "[an injury] from where Mr Baxter had punched her"; it was weirdly shocking/thrilling to have the abuse suddenly and baldly spelled out like that instead of still tiptoeing around it. Also I just really liked Charles.oldenglishrose's review against another edition
5.0
Human Croquet is narrated by Isobel Fairfax and is the story of her family and their neighbours in the village of Lythe. Isobel and Charles’ exotic mother disappeared when they were very young, followed soon after by their father, leaving the children in the care of their steely, old fashioned grandmother and their irascible Aunt Vinny. Even after their father returns several years later no one seems willing to talk about what happened or why. In fact, lots of people in Lythe are hiding things and keeping secrets to themselves, not least Isobel, who keeps finding herself slipping into other periods of time without any explanation.
This is in many ways a very odd book, but it was exactly my kind of odd. My family and I have always played word games and twisted phrases around on themselves, so Isobel’s narration reads rather like I think. The text is peppered with her humorous asides in which she pokes fun at herself: "He runs a hand through his dark curls and brushes them away from his handsome forehead, ‘You’re a good pal, Iz,’ he sighs. I am his friend, his ‘pal’, his ‘chum’ — more like a tin of dog food than a member of the female sex, certainly not the object of his desire."
At other people: "Malcolm Lovat. If I am to have a birthday wish it must be him. He is what I want for birthday and Christmas and best, what I want more than anything in the dark world and wide. Even his name hints at romance and kindness (Lovat, not Malcolm)."
And, probably my favourite, when she takes common idiomatic phrases to absurd (yet also supremely logical) lengths: "‘I’m just marking time at Temple’s,’ Charles says, in explanation of his remarkably dull outer life. (Ah, but what does he give it? B-? C+? He should be careful, one day time might mark him. ‘Och, without doubt,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘that’s the final reckoning.’)"
Isabel’s narration is something that I suspect a reader will either love or hate, but for me it was one of the book’s main attractions.
Another aspect of the book that I particularly enjoyed is the way that Atkinson plays around with motifs from fairy tales (Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel spring to mind immediately as examples). She gives the well-known stories subtle nods without ever explicitly copying them, in a way that suggests that all is not quite as it seems. I found it simultaneously reassuringly familiar as I recognised elements of particular stories and unbalancing as what I knew of those stories indicated that things were not going to go as I expected, which is really how the whole novel works: fundamentally a story about family relationships, it is quite happy to have characters turning into dogs or time travelling without any indication that this is somehow unusual.
Atkinson has an approach to writing about different time streams which I have never come across before, but is so wonderfully simple I wonder why it’s not more common. When Isobel is talking about events taking place in the main timeline of the novel, she writes in the present tense; when she narrates scenes from earlier on in her life, they are written in the past tense. The clear definition between what has happened and what is happening is particularly helpful given how confusing and uncertain the reality of the present becomes, and I found the technique to be a good one. Given my dislike of present tense narratives I was surprised by this. It turns out that I quite enjoy the present tense when it is used in a carefully considered manner and employed effectively.
Human Croquet is a bizarre and wonderful book which I suspect readers will either love as unreservedly as I did or find very odd indeed. Either way, it’s definitely worth trying.
This is in many ways a very odd book, but it was exactly my kind of odd. My family and I have always played word games and twisted phrases around on themselves, so Isobel’s narration reads rather like I think. The text is peppered with her humorous asides in which she pokes fun at herself: "He runs a hand through his dark curls and brushes them away from his handsome forehead, ‘You’re a good pal, Iz,’ he sighs. I am his friend, his ‘pal’, his ‘chum’ — more like a tin of dog food than a member of the female sex, certainly not the object of his desire."
At other people: "Malcolm Lovat. If I am to have a birthday wish it must be him. He is what I want for birthday and Christmas and best, what I want more than anything in the dark world and wide. Even his name hints at romance and kindness (Lovat, not Malcolm)."
And, probably my favourite, when she takes common idiomatic phrases to absurd (yet also supremely logical) lengths: "‘I’m just marking time at Temple’s,’ Charles says, in explanation of his remarkably dull outer life. (Ah, but what does he give it? B-? C+? He should be careful, one day time might mark him. ‘Och, without doubt,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘that’s the final reckoning.’)"
Isabel’s narration is something that I suspect a reader will either love or hate, but for me it was one of the book’s main attractions.
Another aspect of the book that I particularly enjoyed is the way that Atkinson plays around with motifs from fairy tales (Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel spring to mind immediately as examples). She gives the well-known stories subtle nods without ever explicitly copying them, in a way that suggests that all is not quite as it seems. I found it simultaneously reassuringly familiar as I recognised elements of particular stories and unbalancing as what I knew of those stories indicated that things were not going to go as I expected, which is really how the whole novel works: fundamentally a story about family relationships, it is quite happy to have characters turning into dogs or time travelling without any indication that this is somehow unusual.
Atkinson has an approach to writing about different time streams which I have never come across before, but is so wonderfully simple I wonder why it’s not more common. When Isobel is talking about events taking place in the main timeline of the novel, she writes in the present tense; when she narrates scenes from earlier on in her life, they are written in the past tense. The clear definition between what has happened and what is happening is particularly helpful given how confusing and uncertain the reality of the present becomes, and I found the technique to be a good one. Given my dislike of present tense narratives I was surprised by this. It turns out that I quite enjoy the present tense when it is used in a carefully considered manner and employed effectively.
Human Croquet is a bizarre and wonderful book which I suspect readers will either love as unreservedly as I did or find very odd indeed. Either way, it’s definitely worth trying.
lajenn's review against another edition
challenging
funny
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
fanniberger's review against another edition
3.0
it was a wild ride, szerintem a fel konyv elment a fejem felett, de voltak benne nagyon izgi részek
andintothetrees's review against another edition
4.0
An amusing tale of a dysfunctional family (addressing some feminist issues along the way), let down slightly by its disintegrating narrative structure. Read my full review on my book blog.
sarah_kearney's review against another edition
dark
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.5
monsterful_alex's review against another edition
5.0
It's been a long time since I've been hooked by a book with so much childish enthusiasm: reading in the middle of the night, not being able to sleep until i've finished two more chapters, and deciding to have oranges and biscuits for lunch instead of cooking something, because I only had 100 pages to go.
Needless to say it is an immersive narrative, you forget yourself as you plunge into the time-travelling histories of the Fairfaxes - past, present, and everything in between. You have a bit of murder here, a splash of madness there, sprinkled with some 60s suburbia stories, interbellic intermezzos and magical woods, add to that a bit of childhood trauma dealt with with Atkinsonian dry humour, and voila, you have yourself an amazing intricate coming-of-age/faery story/historical drama/thriller novel. It's not as well-knit together as it could have been, plotwise, but it was satisfying enough to give me a couple of sleepless nights and that is as good as it gets.
Needless to say it is an immersive narrative, you forget yourself as you plunge into the time-travelling histories of the Fairfaxes - past, present, and everything in between. You have a bit of murder here, a splash of madness there, sprinkled with some 60s suburbia stories, interbellic intermezzos and magical woods, add to that a bit of childhood trauma dealt with with Atkinsonian dry humour, and voila, you have yourself an amazing intricate coming-of-age/faery story/historical drama/thriller novel. It's not as well-knit together as it could have been, plotwise, but it was satisfying enough to give me a couple of sleepless nights and that is as good as it gets.