After reading Little Bee (see my review below), I was excited to see this book at the bookstore, which I mistakenly thought was new. This is actually Chris Cleve’s first novel. Mostly though, it doesn’t matter.
The subject matter is dark. It is set in London after a terrorist attack during a soccer game in the city and in the year following said attack. The protagonist is an unnamed woman who lost her husband, a member of the bomb squad, and her son in that attack. The story is told as a letter to Osama bin Ladin as she tells him about her life the few days before and the year following the attack. We don’t really get to know her husband and son as they die so quickly. What we learn about her though, is that she is a troubled individual and a habitual adulteress. She is engaging in an affair with a Jasper Black right before and during the times of the attack. Jasper starts out being a sympathetic character and even though their relationship should have ended after the attack, he actually stays and plays a part in her life as well as his live-in girlfriend, Petra. The woman tries to put her life back together, and then it all falls apart. Personally, I didn’t really care for any of the characters much, but maybe it was because of the situation in which I met them. Perhaps Jasper and Petra were really awesome and cool people before the attack and before the woman enters their lives. Maybe the woman was too, cheating aside. But that wasn’t what the book was about.
My big gripe with this book though, was the lack of commas! I understand the woman wasn’t the most educated person in London, and that it is totally possible that an actual letter she wrote to Osama could have been written without commas. However, people do not talk or think without commas. The lack of commas made it very difficult for me to get started on this book, but once I got a feel for the flow, it went better. Then on page 155, commas started magically appearing in the dialogue of the other characters. At first, I thought it was just a mistake by the author, because he would have used commas in those instances. But no, they kept showing up inconsistently. I think that was worse than using no commas at all. The first 155 pages, there were no conversational commas, then we start reading them. Very confusing. I wish the author would have just used the commas to make it easier on us.
But despite the dark subject matter and the difficulty in pacing of the narrative, I really couldn’t put the book down. Honestly, if I had read this before Little Bee, I probably would not have bothered with it. I am very glad I read them out of order.
Grade: 4 stars out of 5
