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I went into this book completely blind. I didn’t even read the inside jacket. I only knew it was on the TOB 2017 short list. The story takes place mostly in Brighton, England in 1984 when the IRA attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher. I have absolutely no recollection of this event, which probably has more to do with the myopia of teenagers than the narrow focus of the U.S. news media.
High Dive is really more a character study of the people who are bystanders to history (like most of us). The three main characters are Phillip “Moose” Finch, the assistant manager of the Grand Hotel in Brighton whose grand ambitions in life have never panned out, his teenaged daughter Freya who is having a fairly normal existential crisis of her own as she considers her future after A-levels and secondary school, and Dan , a young volunteer in the IRA whose idealism is becoming more and more infected with harsh realities. I think the book is well written, but there really is not much in the way of a plot and I found that I needed more momentum for a book of this length to remain interesting to me.
High Dive is really more a character study of the people who are bystanders to history (like most of us). The three main characters are Phillip “Moose” Finch, the assistant manager of the Grand Hotel in Brighton whose grand ambitions in life have never panned out, his teenaged daughter Freya who is having a fairly normal existential crisis of her own as she considers her future after A-levels and secondary school, and Dan , a young volunteer in the IRA whose idealism is becoming more and more infected with harsh realities. I think the book is well written, but there really is not much in the way of a plot and I found that I needed more momentum for a book of this length to remain interesting to me.