What a strange pick for the Man Booker longlist.
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The Blurb:
On a stifling summer's day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack's in charge, she said. I won't be long.
But she doesn't come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.
Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you.
Meanwhile Jack is still in charge - of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they're alone in the house, and - quite suddenly - of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother.
But the truth can be a dangerous thing . . .
The Review
Well, this is a really difficult one to review. I wouldn't normally have chosen it, but it ended up on the longlist for the Man Booker 2018, and seemed like such a random mainstream book to have landed on the list that I wanted to find out what was so special about it.
And therein lies the problem. Nothing, there's nothing very special about it. It's not a badly written book, it's just a fairly unsurprising crime/detective thriller. And this is where being nominated for literary awards can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. Because people are going to read this with high expectations. They are going to expect to see how this stands out from its genre. And I'm really not convinced that it does.
As with many crime thrillers, this comes with a great premise. A mother that disappears and leaves her children to fend for themselves by the side of the road. What could have happened to her? The best character in this book by far, is the young son, Jack. Left to fend for himself and his young sisters when all around have abandoned them, he turns to burglary to make ends meet. His story felt more believable then the rest of the characters, whose motivations were questionable at best and sometimes, downright farcical.
If you're looking for twists and turns, you wont get them here. There's very few surprises - basically it's a 'whodunnit', where you'll think you know 'whodunnit'....and you'll be right, they did do it. There's also not a huge sense of closure at the end - you will find out who did it, but with no real explanation as to why.
This is the kind of book that you should take on your beach holiday, read in a day and a month down the road, you'll have forgotten the entire plot. It's not bad fiction, but just as equally, it's just not memorable fiction, which is why I am baffled by the Man Booker longlisting. My cynical side wonders whether this is a ploy to bring a more mainstream audience to this literary award...? And hey, I'm not elitist, I absolutely think every genre deserves a place in prize long and shortlists. But when they do, they need to be exemplars of their type. Otherwise it makes a mockery of the whole thing.
Having said all that, if you do enjoy crime thrillers, I'd totally give this a go. It gets rave reviews on Goodreads, and if you go in with no expectations, you may quite enjoy it.