I purchased this on Kindle after reading the Guardian's double page spread on the author, not, if I am honest, because the book sounded irresistible but because she was clearly a notable contemporary writer (witness the double spread) and because the ebook was only 99p (I never said I wasn't shallow.)
Reading it was a disappointment. The genre of 'older woman taking a journey after the death of a long-term spouse' is a dreary one at best and this narrative is aimless and peppered with inconsequential encounters that never quite achieve anything for the characters or indeed interest (this) reader. A scene early in the book where the protagonist Yvonne takes a walk to the beach, orders and doesn't eat an ice cream and then walks back to her sterile holiday rental house had me right back in my novel writing class hearing the tutor telling us that every page of a novel must be interesting: either the events or the style or the atmosphere. Vendela must have missed that class.
Another inherent pitfall of the 'dead loved one' genre is that much of it is composed of memories of the dead loved one, so that we are either in the realm of being told or in the realm of the protagonist buttonholing passers by conveniently provided for this purpose (and no other) by the author who are then forced to stand glassy eyed until the protagonist and author have finished their Ancient Mariner moment.
The blurb by Zoe Heller calls it a 'moving meditation on love and a page-turning adventure', a description that actually had me double checking that the correct book had been beamed to my Kindle. Still, I have usefully reminded myself that this is a genre I don't enjoy and should avoid in future.
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