Yes! I didn’t know much going in, so it was a lovely surprise to see how moving and funny it was! A good meaty one for discussion, I think, and excited to hear your thoughts!
I loved this book so much. I felt heard especially around everything suddenly making sense. Martha is the same age as me which was nice. I loved the whole family. They were all so real and fleshed out.
Excellent review. I loved this book. I think not specifying the diagnosis to the reader was a great move whilst still demonstrating how significant receiving the diagnosis is for Martha.
Thank you Bob for doing this. I finished the book on Friday and absolutely liked it. Going into it, it felt like I might not, but the way it was written, the humour as well, you could really see Martha and understand the situation through her eyes! I am still in the phase of processing this book
I loved this book, one of my top 3 for the year so far. I think not giving us a name forced us into Martha's position in a small way, I kept searching for an illness for a while i thought she was depressed, then bipolar, but she clearly wasn't either and not knowing really demonstrated the power of a diagnosis.
Nice! And yes, I agree! I kept on thinking I’d missed the diagnosis early on in the book, and I was so glad when I realised what Mason was doing- it made so much sense to frustrate the reader’s attempts to pin it down.
Hi Bob, I adored this book!! It was a very lovely surprise for me because I really wasn't sure it would,d be my cup of tea, it had been described as similar to Sally Rooney and I am not a fan of her work, however, this hooked me straight away. I loved the humour and the brutal honesty and ultimately the fact that Martha doesn't take her self too seriously. I actually thought it was great that the illness was not named, I felt like there was freedom then in a readers observation and experience, without the diagnosis being pigeon holed. My experience is that everyone's experience around illness ( of whichever kind) is very individual and the decisions to not name it gave the reader more space to relate in their own way. So far I have read 4 of the shortlist and this is my winner at present.
Hello! And glad to hear it! Yes, ‘brutal honesty’ is a perfect description for it! I really liked the illness not being named too- like you said, I think it would have been too easy for the reader to then say, ‘oh she just has X’. Ooh, glad to hear it! I think this is probably one of my favourites too so far!
Despite an unlikable main character, I loved this book and rated it five stars. Having said that, there are so many excellent books nominated for The Women’s Prize this year, that it only was my fourth favorite. However, if it wins, I would be perfectly fine with that. I enjoyed your review of this book!
Ahh, totally fair! I think she does purposely keep a lot of characters at arm’s length, so there is a bit of an alienation, but I’m intrigued what a re-read would bring to it!
The problem for me with this book was none of the male characters went beyond being a cardboard cut out and were never three dimensional men with complexities or actual motivations, they were just moved around like chessmen on a checkered board. There was a lot of potential here and it was a great start, but I feel it needed much more work to become a full fledge novel with characters you could understand and care about, such as when the main character viciously unleashes cruelties they didn’t really land because there was no inner life of her victims to be devastated over or hurt by them.
Ahh, totally fair. I wonder if part of that was that Martha’s inner life was so all-consuming for her at times that she almost views them as chess pieces at times. But I see what you mean about those characters!
Ahh, totally fair. I wonder if part of that was that Martha’s inner life was so all-consuming for her at times that she almost views them as chess pieces at times. But I see what you mean about those characters!
@@BobTheBookerer I considered that as well, we are supposed to be seeing them through her eyes, but yet I feel we also needed to see beyond her to understand how her abilities at perceiving them is flawed by her condition. Maybe that first husband was a complete cad and a horrible person, we will never know one way or the other, because we got such a limited sense of him and absolutely nothing to establish him as a real flesh and blood character. It would have been nice to have something there for us to contradict her perception of him instead of just seeing him as a bad person. In the end I’m not even sure narratively that the first husband added anything to the story, he was quickly there and then quickly dispatched. I didn’t even get the sense that it was a manic episode on her part and was a mistake and we or her learned anything from it beyond it being failed marriage number one. You could wholesale excise it and not really miss a beat.
@@bookofdust Ah yes, that’s a good point. Her relationships with men I found quite odd at times, mostly because I couldn’t see what she’d see in them (and I think a large part of that might be what you said- they weren’t always that fleshed out). And what you said about cutting that first marriage out wholesale makes a lot of sense actually- the more I think about it, the more that was a plot point to show her having ‘failed’ rather than a relationship, per se.
@@BobTheBookerer Ugh, it won the Fiction Prize at the British Book Awards, I guess it was a me issue with the book more than a underdeveloped characters flaws issues that I see.
