Review: Not The Best, Not The Worst
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 31, 2013
When I first started this book, I was tempted to put it down. In fact, I did just that, and came back to it a few weeks later.It is, in some ways, a touching story of two men who fell in love as boys in Secondary School and manage to build themselves a life in 1970's England.The love between the boys/men is written very well. There is little in the way of sex scenes (not a bad thing), but what bothered me was the seemingly eternal rehash of family relationships over and over again. At some point it became tedious, and I wanted the book to end.And end it did. Not with a resolution, but almost as though the author had run out of breath, and just put his word processor down in the middle of a paragraph. I like a touching ending, it ties a neat bow on the package. "Let's have fish and chips" is certainly not a touching ending.There were moments in the book that I really liked. The wedding reception was a gem. But Niall's religious bigot parents grew old real fast, and the unremitting detail of which store they went to and what they saw there was boring almost beyond belief.Although the author, apparently, has a dislike of commas, the book was well-written overall, and I can only hope that he offers subsequent books that exhibit a bit more discipline and polish. I'd certainly be willing to try them.