Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.39 AVERAGE
3.39 AVERAGE
*Spoilers* This started off as ‘good’, second part was ‘ok’, but third part was terrible and brought my rating down to a two star. I’m a big fan of Robert Webb and was looking forward to a book with some comedy. I’m not sure what it is about books that are labelled as ‘funny’ but I just never seem to get the humour. These ‘laughed and laughed’ reviews puzzle me as I didn’t even chuckle. I liked the idea of the story but my first niggle was when Kate meets her husband again for the first time in the student bar. The reader has experienced around 100 pages of her crippling grief for his loss. Yet, within a few minutes of seeing him again, she reaches this monumental irritation at being reminded with some of his annoying habits. I would understand if they were within a couple of weeks of the reunion. But so immediate after first contact felt unrealistic. The third part of the book was such a disappointment and a bit embarrassing. The reader is subjected to pages and pages of this bizarre car chase that would have been more appropriate in an Ian Fleming story. And the conclusion just left me with a ‘huh???”. Good idea for a story, but poorly executed.
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I really enjoyed the Audible edition of this book. Olivia Coleman narrates it brilliantly!
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
As my book club ladies will know from my experience of The Two Lives of Lydia Bird, there is one specific trope that I hate more than any other: widow in mourning experiences philosophical abnormality that allows her to see her husband again and realise her husband wasn’t that great so she decides to settle down with their mutual friend. I. Hate. This.
In less than 24 hours (admittedly following a sci-fi related event where she relived a section of her life) Kate went from being just about to commit suicide because of her grief, to starting a new relationship. It was so disingenuous and had me cringing.
I did not need Kate to find love again with anybody. If she had chosen to live with purpose again, started at the book shop and decided to reconnect with people again, especially her friend Amy, I would have been really satisfied. The reader did not need to see Kate find a new man, it was not the answer!!
The other major issue with this book was how much it tried to achieve. As well as the whole mourning wife goes back in time to meet husband again thing, there was also an AI-related international conspiracy and (at the end) revolutionary cancer detection that saved thousands of lives. This book was only 290 pages long! While the car chase scene was more fun to read, I was kind of reeling about what this book actually was. It was bizarre and rushed.
By far the worst part about this book was the ending. So because of her little sci-fi trip, there became two time lines for Luke: he was simultaneously both alive and dead in one universe. So Kate was mourning him while another woman settled down and had kids with him. This was genuinely so frustrating and lazy! For me it was an enormous plot hole and raised massive questions. Why do all their mutual friends think he’s dead? Do his parents know him as dead or alive? Why has he not looked to find the woman who saved him? Honestly I was appalled. This final chapter was so unnecessary I actually groaned in exasperation. Such a disappointment.
This book scrapes its two star review because the writing was relatively fun and I did laugh a couple of times. Also I liked Kate’s dad. The end.
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I was very excited that Netgally added a audiobook version and this was the first book I chose to listen to. Come again started out rather slowly but Kates story was very interesting in the end and ultimately I’m glad I stuck with this book.
Kate is understandably depressed after the death of her husband, but she is a strong woman who finds her way through depression and learns to love again in the end.
Kate is understandably depressed after the death of her husband, but she is a strong woman who finds her way through depression and learns to love again in the end.
emotional
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
funny
fast-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:
Complicated
Listened to the Audiobook - the most redeeming thing about the experience was Olivia Colman's wonderful narration.
Look... I think Robert Webb is a very clever man, and certainly a very funny one. I've enjoyed pretty much everything he's done up until now. So, I wanted to enjoy this book... I really did. I tried, so hard, to enjoy it, but I just... couldn't.
First off, it was structured very oddly - I think the first part, the part before Kate "comes again", is far too long. I understand that we need a picture of how bad things are for her, but it's quite repetitive and he could've cut to the chase. The part where she's "coming again" then seems far too short; I understand that the point of it is to be 24 hours, but it just felt weird to come out of it so quickly, seeing as that's the premise of the book (at least, according to adverts and the like). Then the last part seemed to take up quite a lot of room, but also, it squeezed in a lot of things that I feel hadn't really been set up adequately.
Kate isn't a likeable character for me. She's not empathetic, as Robert McKee would put it. First, she's too good at everything to be a real person... she's a black-belt at karate, a pedant with an impressive knowledge of grammar, a mathematical genius, and the possessor of a flawless memory that allows her to recall everything that's happened to her in minute detail since childhood... we don't see her averageness in anything. Second, she's not nice. She's spiteful and judgemental and she's got a superiority complex, and I didn't enjoy listening to events unfold from her view. She also seems to have this perfect, completely unblemished relationship with her (late) father, which is just so unrealistic in comparison to any real parent-child relationship.
My third main issue with this book is the fact that the women (with the exception of one or two characters) all seem to be annoying or petty or unlikeable in some major way, and the male characters, bar Charlie and the racket he becomes involved with, are all seemingly perfect, sweet, and all the rest of it. This bothers me for obvious reasons.
I know Webb wasn't going for the realism factor, but with books that verge on utter ridiculousness (as exemplified by the third part of this one in particular), you either suspend your disbelief and get swept along or you struggle to invest yourself in it throughout. My experience unfortunately aligned with the latter. There were a few fun moments, and I really did like a couple of the characters (e.g. Toby)... but other than that I was largely disappointed.
Look... I think Robert Webb is a very clever man, and certainly a very funny one. I've enjoyed pretty much everything he's done up until now. So, I wanted to enjoy this book... I really did. I tried, so hard, to enjoy it, but I just... couldn't.
First off, it was structured very oddly - I think the first part, the part before Kate "comes again", is far too long. I understand that we need a picture of how bad things are for her, but it's quite repetitive and he could've cut to the chase. The part where she's "coming again" then seems far too short; I understand that the point of it is to be 24 hours, but it just felt weird to come out of it so quickly, seeing as that's the premise of the book (at least, according to adverts and the like). Then the last part seemed to take up quite a lot of room, but also, it squeezed in a lot of things that I feel hadn't really been set up adequately.
Kate isn't a likeable character for me. She's not empathetic, as Robert McKee would put it. First, she's too good at everything to be a real person... she's a black-belt at karate, a pedant with an impressive knowledge of grammar, a mathematical genius, and the possessor of a flawless memory that allows her to recall everything that's happened to her in minute detail since childhood... we don't see her averageness in anything. Second, she's not nice. She's spiteful and judgemental and she's got a superiority complex, and I didn't enjoy listening to events unfold from her view. She also seems to have this perfect, completely unblemished relationship with her (late) father, which is just so unrealistic in comparison to any real parent-child relationship.
My third main issue with this book is the fact that the women (with the exception of one or two characters) all seem to be annoying or petty or unlikeable in some major way, and the male characters, bar Charlie and the racket he becomes involved with, are all seemingly perfect, sweet, and all the rest of it. This bothers me for obvious reasons.
I know Webb wasn't going for the realism factor, but with books that verge on utter ridiculousness (as exemplified by the third part of this one in particular), you either suspend your disbelief and get swept along or you struggle to invest yourself in it throughout. My experience unfortunately aligned with the latter. There were a few fun moments, and I really did like a couple of the characters (e.g. Toby)... but other than that I was largely disappointed.
I was so disappointed not to have liked this because I loved Robert Webb’s autobiography How Not To Be A Boy and the blurb of this sounded so intriguing. Come Again centres around Kate Mardsen, who has just lost Luke, her partner of 28 years, to an undetected brain tumour and is wracked with guilt over not spotting his health issues sooner. She’s on the verge of taking her own life when she is suddenly (and inexplicably) transported back in time to the day they met, Freshers Week 1992 at the University of York. She knows that the brain tumour is already growing in Luke’s head so the question is whether Kate can manage to relive falling in love with her dead husband for the first time and save him from death in the future. Honestly, if this had just been a sentimental rumination on nostalgia, innocence and the nature of fate, like I was expecting, I think it would have been a perfectly fine first novel. It was funny and bits of it were genuinely quite heartfelt and moving. I would have even been able to look the other way about the rather heavy handed and preachy monologues about the state of modern politics (which I didn’t even disagree with, they just felt a bit clumsy and shoehorned in). But I cannot forgive the total and utter bollocks that was the whole spy caper that ended up taking up a good half of the book. The blurb promised a bittersweet rumination on loss and first love, not karate chopping Russian mobsters and evading them with the help of taxi drivers who secretly work for MI6 (I wish I was making this up). It almost felt like Webb was afraid to write something too overly sappy and so felt the need to stick a bonkers car chase in. And if that wasn’t enough, I could have really done without the little plot twist in the epilogue. In the interest of not spoiling anything, all I'll say is that if you’re going to drop a bomb like that you need a narratively consistent explanation for it.