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A review by verityw
Freya by Françoise Hardy, Anthony Quinn
2.0
***Copy from NetGalley in return for an honest review****
I'm quite confused about this book. I liked Quinn's last book Curtain Call - and was interested in the idea of this - particularly as it's tangentially connected to the characters in Curtain Call. That last book was a murder mystery (if quite a literary fiction-y one) and this definitely is literary fiction, or wants to be.
It is a coming of age story that starts at the end of the war and goes through until the 1960s and covers a lot of the ground that you would expect a book about an ambitious woman who has tasted freedom and the world of work during the war to cover. But Freya is deeply dislikable - and doesn't ever seem to learn or grow from her mistakes. As I've said before, you don't have to like characters to want to read about them, but Freya is too far over that line - she's arrogant, mean, judgmental, happy to walk all over people and use them (except in a couple of notable and out of character seeming moments). There is a core cast around her, of whom Nancy is the only one I cared about - and she makes some dumb decisions of her own.
I really struggled with why I disliked Freya so much, when I was able to get past some similar decisions/traits in other books (the younger generation in the Cazalets make some bad decisions in the war and post war period but I didn't have as strong a reaction to them as I did to Freya) and I think it's probably because of her lack of self awareness and utter conviction in her own superiority. Freya is very quick to see faults in other people - but incapable of seeing that she often does similar things. It takes a lot for me to not get outraged on behalf of workplace sexism, but when Freya's not getting the breaks she thinks she deserves, I was thinking back to her harsh critique of Nancy's novel back in university days and wondering if it was payback for someone who isn't as good or important as she thinks she is!
Now you can probably tell from this that I think it would make a great book club book - I've written loads about this despite the fact that I didn't really like it much. There are a few clunky bits of writing, but most of my gripes are with the characters and the story not the writing. Thought provoking, but I'm not sure I'll be reading the next book from Quinn.
I'm quite confused about this book. I liked Quinn's last book Curtain Call - and was interested in the idea of this - particularly as it's tangentially connected to the characters in Curtain Call. That last book was a murder mystery (if quite a literary fiction-y one) and this definitely is literary fiction, or wants to be.
It is a coming of age story that starts at the end of the war and goes through until the 1960s and covers a lot of the ground that you would expect a book about an ambitious woman who has tasted freedom and the world of work during the war to cover. But Freya is deeply dislikable - and doesn't ever seem to learn or grow from her mistakes. As I've said before, you don't have to like characters to want to read about them, but Freya is too far over that line - she's arrogant, mean, judgmental, happy to walk all over people and use them (except in a couple of notable and out of character seeming moments). There is a core cast around her, of whom Nancy is the only one I cared about - and she makes some dumb decisions of her own.
I really struggled with why I disliked Freya so much, when I was able to get past some similar decisions/traits in other books (the younger generation in the Cazalets make some bad decisions in the war and post war period but I didn't have as strong a reaction to them as I did to Freya) and I think it's probably because of her lack of self awareness and utter conviction in her own superiority. Freya is very quick to see faults in other people - but incapable of seeing that she often does similar things. It takes a lot for me to not get outraged on behalf of workplace sexism, but when Freya's not getting the breaks she thinks she deserves, I was thinking back to her harsh critique of Nancy's novel back in university days and wondering if it was payback for someone who isn't as good or important as she thinks she is!
Now you can probably tell from this that I think it would make a great book club book - I've written loads about this despite the fact that I didn't really like it much. There are a few clunky bits of writing, but most of my gripes are with the characters and the story not the writing. Thought provoking, but I'm not sure I'll be reading the next book from Quinn.