Review: This is a lovely book
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 2, 2013
This is perhaps the ideal and archetypical Bildungsroman for and about women. I loved it.Who doesn't wish for a second chance at life? Who doesn't think, from time to time, 'Well, I could have handled that better, if only I'd stopped to think.'?The protagonist here is given such a chance, having caught the brass ring on life's merry-go-round and won another spin around the wheel. It's emotionally satisfying on many levels, not least of which is that we may realise that we don't actually *have* to fall off the edge of a pier.As the author proclaims on her blogsite (and in the description of the book itself) this is a self-published novel, and it shows. I think she does herself a disservice, though, in that one of the huge advantages of self-publishing on Kindle is that it's a trivial matter to make corrections and resubmit the corrected text, whereupon all one's errors softly and suddenly vanished away, like the hapless victims of the Boojums, but with happier results.In fact, exporting one's unedited text to a Kindle is a wonderful proofing tool, since one can quite simply enlarge or reduce the font size to look at the text in different ways, can even have it read aloud (which makes quite a few errors instantly obvious), and instantly highlight or make extensive notes with little more effort than flicking one's finger across the page. I do this all the time.I'm a writer, and can proudly say that my own books have been much improved by the attentions of my talented and insightful editors who not only caught my little errors, but a few of my big ones, and often knew what I was *trying* to say better than I knew myself. I promise not to mention them, and I don't have to, because they never went beyond the editorial stage.On the Kindle, though, publishing means never having to say you're sorry...