Sometimes days become more fluid than chocolate milkshake! The other week I had the Emily Dickinson phrase, ‘started early, took my dog’ in my head in connection with the latest Kate Atkinson I had not read. So I abandoned my normal shopping habits, went to Tesco and came home with Jackson Brodie’s best outing I feel since Case Histories started off the wonderful series.
To say that the book is edible is an understatement. And Atkinson can ‘do’ multiple viewpoints as smooth as oil and with still the sense of some arch machine, teasing the reader to guess all the coincidences and connections before they arrive…
Atkinson makes you care: simple when you are in the middle of the relationships, but then so hard to do. And to maintain.
I finished ‘when will there be good news’ just now and found myself again deferring anything until it was read. It seems to gain momentum in terms of enagagement after the most devastating and unexpected opening where you feel this is a writer confident enough in her own talent, to create intimacy and then destroy it..so that we mourn the losss of that intimacy for the rest of the book.
This sesne of loss is essential to the message. And therefore we know that the character who has survived such loss, will do anything to avoid such loss again.
Anything.
Fabulously readable!
