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A review by frickative
The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets by Sophie Hannah
2.0
This book was a bit of a disappointment. It started off so promisingly with "The Octopus Nest", in which a couple discover the same stranger in the background of all their holiday photos. The premise alone gave me chills, and the story itself scared the hell out of me, despite the fact that I read it in public in broad daylight. The following story, "Friendly Amid the Haters", also started off with promise. As in her debut novel, Little Voice, Hannah demonstrated how adept she is at writing violence against women, but it all rather petered away into nothing in the end, and the rest of the stories were never anywhere close to as good as the first.
In "We All Say What We Want", a guy is passive aggressive at work and adopts a new family at home. It was largely dull and didn't really go anywhere. "The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets", "The Tub", Herod's Valentines" and "The Most Enlightened Person I've Ever Met" all featured desperate women in varying degrees of derangement and mostly made for frustrating reads, though the end of the latter was fairly amusing in its utter brazenness.
The most touching story was "Twelve Noon", about a mother long estranged from her daughter. It lacked the thriller element which a lot of the stories featured, but alongside "The Octopus Nest" is perhaps the one I'll best remember. Finally, "The Nursery Bear" was suitably creepy but maddeningly ambiguous, without enough pay-off for my liking, and "You Are a Gongedip" was just plain silly.
I've booked myself a ticket to see Hannah speak at the start of next month, so I'm trying to race through some of her work. I borrowed this from the library and almost purchased my own copy on the strength of the first story. Taking the remainder into account, I'm quite glad I didn't.
In "We All Say What We Want", a guy is passive aggressive at work and adopts a new family at home. It was largely dull and didn't really go anywhere. "The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets", "The Tub", Herod's Valentines" and "The Most Enlightened Person I've Ever Met" all featured desperate women in varying degrees of derangement and mostly made for frustrating reads, though the end of the latter was fairly amusing in its utter brazenness.
The most touching story was "Twelve Noon", about a mother long estranged from her daughter. It lacked the thriller element which a lot of the stories featured, but alongside "The Octopus Nest" is perhaps the one I'll best remember. Finally, "The Nursery Bear" was suitably creepy but maddeningly ambiguous, without enough pay-off for my liking, and "You Are a Gongedip" was just plain silly.
I've booked myself a ticket to see Hannah speak at the start of next month, so I'm trying to race through some of her work. I borrowed this from the library and almost purchased my own copy on the strength of the first story. Taking the remainder into account, I'm quite glad I didn't.