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A review by bent
New Cardiff by Charles Webb
2.0
Not a great book. It consists almost solely of dialogue, and very awkward dialogue, where one character makes some kind of incomplete statement and the other character keeps asking questions to draw out more information while the original speaker is somewhat evasive. Or you have two characters talking but having different conversations - Character A talks about their relationship while Character B talks about the museum. Each character alternates speaking lines about their different conversations.
I was actually well into the book before it dawned on me that the book was meant to be humorous - not a good sign. After that, the awkward dialogue made a little more sense as it was obviously written for comedic effect. It wasn't any funnier, it just was more logical. There was one line in the book that made me laugh out loud, but that was it.
Some of the set-ups seemed very contrived - the scene at the golf course being a prime example. I found that I started to lose patience over the last hundred pages. The book is basically a romantic comedy, but it's not really marketed that way. Had it been, I probably never would have picked it up.
You never really get to know the characters, since the dialogue doesn't give a lot away about any of them. Are you supposed to like Colin? Like Mandy? Hate Vera? They're all very two-dimensional, so it's hard to really care about any of them. I could see how it might work as a movie, however, which is apparently what they've done, so this might be a case of the movie being better than the book. I definitely couldn't recommend it as a book.
I was actually well into the book before it dawned on me that the book was meant to be humorous - not a good sign. After that, the awkward dialogue made a little more sense as it was obviously written for comedic effect. It wasn't any funnier, it just was more logical. There was one line in the book that made me laugh out loud, but that was it.
Some of the set-ups seemed very contrived - the scene at the golf course being a prime example. I found that I started to lose patience over the last hundred pages. The book is basically a romantic comedy, but it's not really marketed that way. Had it been, I probably never would have picked it up.
You never really get to know the characters, since the dialogue doesn't give a lot away about any of them. Are you supposed to like Colin? Like Mandy? Hate Vera? They're all very two-dimensional, so it's hard to really care about any of them. I could see how it might work as a movie, however, which is apparently what they've done, so this might be a case of the movie being better than the book. I definitely couldn't recommend it as a book.