Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by anuvrata
Greatest Hits by Laura Barnett
2.0
⁷The tie in with Kathryn Williams accompanying album made me give this a try. The real life musician brought to life the songs / lyrics contained in the novel, written by the author as part of the narrative of fictional singer/songwriter Cass Wheeler. The album was okay if not outstanding in her catalogue, but on reading the novel seem totally unsuitable for the early to mid 70's vibe that Wheeler was meant to be known for.
At times the pages turned easily, but the novel does not successfully hop around from current day to different periods of her past, whilst it lets you know what is going to happen fairly early on. This led to dreading the disintegration of the protagonists life, which eventually was covered fairly swiftly (thankfully) but had dreadful consequences. I am struggling to finish the book with 30 odd pages left, there seems little point, the writing is average, the timeline frustrating and confusing and the character of her modern day paramour Larry is sketchy so I care very little whether they get it together. Presuming a happy ending (of sort, given the previous sadness), I may leave it at that due to being past caring.
Just to be clear, I don't normally leave books unfinished and read a lot of long hard to read novels, so its not like I give up easily. I also enjoyed Barnett's previous novel "Versions of Us", so there are qualifications for my dissapointment.
Update - finished it in the end, but it was if she just wanted to say goodbye to the project by that point, very unsatisfying and half baked.
At times the pages turned easily, but the novel does not successfully hop around from current day to different periods of her past, whilst it lets you know what is going to happen fairly early on. This led to dreading the disintegration of the protagonists life, which eventually was covered fairly swiftly (thankfully) but had dreadful consequences. I am struggling to finish the book with 30 odd pages left, there seems little point, the writing is average, the timeline frustrating and confusing and the character of her modern day paramour Larry is sketchy so I care very little whether they get it together. Presuming a happy ending (of sort, given the previous sadness), I may leave it at that due to being past caring.
Just to be clear, I don't normally leave books unfinished and read a lot of long hard to read novels, so its not like I give up easily. I also enjoyed Barnett's previous novel "Versions of Us", so there are qualifications for my dissapointment.
Update - finished it in the end, but it was if she just wanted to say goodbye to the project by that point, very unsatisfying and half baked.