Bookgazing

Today I’m talking about ‘Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he Stole my Ma’ by Kerry Hudson, which is one of the books on the Green Carnation Prize 2012 short list; the first UK based award for work by LGBT authors. I gathered together a group of bloggers interested in this prize, which was also created by a blogger (Simon of Savidge Reads) and over the past few days each of them has posted about one book that made the short list this year. Now it’s my turn!

I have been cavalierly promising that my contribution to this project would be a vlog review of Hudson’s novel, where you could see my face and everything (no, wait, that sounds…different than what I meant). Unfortunately I failed to put aside enough time to investigate the wonders of my laptops in-built video camera, which was a mistake as I am generally technically inept (secret - you don’t have to be technically advanced to market IT products). So instead of a vlog my contribution to the Green Carnation Prize reading group is a heap of bullet points about a book that keeps its tone as fun and frothy as the quirky zing of its lengthy title promises, while concentrating on character whose lives are hard.

( Let's begin )

All in all ‘Tony Hogan bought me an Ice Cream Float before he Stole my Ma’ is an interesting novel, which contains lots to things to think about. It’s a quick, entertaining read and it has a lot of heart. But is it a winner? Make sure to check the Green Carnation Prize blog on 12th Dec 2012 to find out which title has won.

You can see the full list of the reviews our reading group wrote about the books on the short list in the master post. After all this reviewing and discussion, which do you think will take the glory?

Annalaura Welles lives above the animals in a barn, sharing one room with her four small children. Her husband John, was a sharecropper; a person hired to work an area of farm land for the owner of an estate in return for a lump sum of cash, dependant on the size and quality of the crop raised, so the whole family live on the McNaughton estate. Last season John raised an outstanding crop, but now John has disappeared, apparently abandoning the family just before the second season’s planting period. He has stolen Annalaura’s money and taken much of the family’s small food store. Annalaura is desperate to hide the fact that John is gone because if Alexander McNaughton, the owner of the estate, finds out there is no man to pull the crop in he will evict her family from the tenancy. As a black women without a husband, she will also become ‘fair game’ for any white man around (this is 1913, after slavery has been abolished but a long way from any kind of legal equality for black Americans). So, Annalaura struggles to project the idea that John is still around, while covertly dealing with the consequences of his departure and theft.

‘Page from a Tennessee Journal’ is written in the third person and relates the separate perspectives of four main characters. The reader is immediately sucked into Annalaura’s desperate attempt to survive in the first chapter, then the narrative follows McNaughton and his wife in the second chapter, before shifting focus again to concentrate on Annalaura’s husband John. The reader learns that he has gone to the city in the hopes of earning enough money to buy his own parcel of land, so that he won’t have to work for a white man any more. At this time, southern, white estate owners blatantly rob their black tenants, under the cover of providing them with essential materials for living and working ‘on tick’. It is understood that the cost of items such as seed to grow the crop and food to eat while they wait for the crop to grow, will come out of the tenants earnings when the crop is sold. By levying this ‘advance’ white estate owners make sure that black tenants never earn enough to invest in their futures and break from a cycle of what is essentially indentured labour. John Welles is an exceptional tenant, who pulled a tobacco crop that made ‘...three thousand dollars, more than twice any other tenant farmer he ever had...’ from an uninspiring mid-forty acreage but after one season working for McNaughton, he understands that he will never earn enough money from share cropping to forge an independent future . So, he robs his wife and leaves his small children to work the land during the crucial planting and harvesting period.

That might seem a harsh judgement. I mean, John Welles has noble aims right? He’s fighting his own battle against oppression. And of course, John himself doesn’t frame leaving his family, quite as I have when he thinks about his actions. John sees leaving his wife behind as a noble endeavour; he will get a city job counting cards at a high rolling establishment in order to put his children through school and return the hero. That is a worthwhile aim and many readers will surely find themselves conflicted as the man (who in Annalaura’s section is described as a reckless, restless, deserting dreamer) is humanised. It is important to note that even though his actions cause his wife serious problems, he is in his turn screwed by an unfair, prejudiced society. Intersectional analysis of history = complicated.

However, the novel is careful to never disregard the first inevitable reading of John’s actions as callous. I feel that it actively endorses the idea that John is both right and wrong by returning to focus on Annalaura’s struggles. Though John’s dreams are portrayed sympathetically in the novel, the way he goes about putting his plan into action is not. I’ve already mentioned that he steals food that Annalaura needs, in order to make his trip. While he is away from his family he takes up with other women. The sacrifices he makes are rarely sacrifices that impact on him, although he has convinced himself that he is as pained by circumstances as Annalaura must be, for example he stays in the city longer than necessary for his own pleasure, which leaves Annalaura open to serious harm but when called on this behaviour he implies that circumstances keep him from his wife and he is suffering by missing his children. If his employer hadn’t physically kept some of his wages back for Annalaura there is every possibility that he’d have kept spending in order to justify why he needed to spend even longer away from home. Meanwhile Annalaura faces starvation and is raped by Alexander McNaughton repeatedly.

Many of these thoughtless actions that readers may find hard to forgive stem from the historical context John exists in, for example he rationalises taking money from the family by claiming sole ownership of it as the man of the house and invoking his grand plans for freeing his family from white control. He also refuses to acknowledge the inevitable realities for a young woman with four children left with little food and no way to earn money, because society tells him that no matter what a woman should always remain faithful. Rape is not a concept he seems to understand in the same way that we would. Howard tries to present John as a balanced character, who has good parts to his character, but is heavily influenced by his times. However, I sometimes felt that the book had perhaps set John Welles up as too unlikeable a character for readers to sympathise with, despite the fact that he has been placed in a tough position by society. Without playing oppression Olympics I’ve got to say it’s hard to feel so sorry for a man whose dreams and aspirations are being denied him by the society he lives in, when he’s a cheating, stealing bastard who does not react as modern readers may hope on coming home to find his wife has been raped, even when we’re aware of how historical context affects his actions.

I feel the same way about how the book portrays Alexander McNaughton, the man who repeatedly rapes Annalaura. Alexander is shown as a man of his time period, claiming the free, black woman that everyone else around him said was his right, but he also has genuine feelings for his child who died and eventually comes to feel he is in love with Annalaura. Again, the bad guys aren’t always one dimensional villains. Alexander McNaughton believes he has a right to Annalaura, because his society reinforced that idea through everyday behaviour and rhetoric, much as John Welles was convinced by society’s rhetoric that it was fine for a married man to sleep around as long as he always came home, but unforgivable for a woman not to ‘fight’ if commanded to sleep with a white man. There are probably tons of things our future generations are going to boggle at that we all find totally acceptable because of our modern rhetorical structures, so we have to try not to judge historical characters in a way that positions our generation as the unquestionable pinnacle of enlightenment.

Still, the wife beating (Welles) and rape (McNaughton) perpetrated by these two men are terrible things, we know that the victims of these actions have been hurt, even if the person doing these things is surrounded by cultural reasoning that allows us to understand they were ordinary human beings rather than exceptional monsters. So, personally I needed to be given more of a reason to empathise with the male characters, in order to circumvent my impulse to judge them as bad people with everything taken on balance. I didn’t get enough sympathetic content, or perhaps the novel didn’t convey the sympathetic content that it did put across quite strongly enough. Either way I found my sympathy and interest in viewing the two men as human beings with their own problems disappeared as the novel progressed. By the end I thought they were both totally off the rails awful and although towards the end of the book both men show positive human qualities (John sets out to kill Alexander, then gives up this quest to keep his children safe from the inevitable lynching that would follow, while Alexander helps Annalaura through a difficult birth when she’s all alone) these events just weren’t enough to counter balance all the time I’d spent watching them be terrible, terrible people towards the female characters. For whatever reason I firmly aligned myself with the women against the men, instead of finding a way to sympathise with everyone. I’m still not ruling out the idea that personal feeling has influenced my reading of a couple of characters who other readers will be able to both sympathise with and hate just a bit, but I have read books that successfully convinced me to feel sympathy and dislike before now, for example ‘The Tiger’s Wife’ contains a character who is abusive, but also seemed separately sympathetic to me.

What I feel the book does really well is to show exactly how hard life could be for women involved with these particular kind of men, by introducing the reader to these two complicated, but ultimately violent male characters, which neither of the two sympathetic female characters can trust. Annalaura is a woman trapped between a rock and a hard place in this book. And McNaughton’s wife Eula Mae lives in a loveless, predictable marriage, which she tolerates by deceiving herself, until her husband begins to fall in love with Annalaura (although, of course he doesn’t fall in love with her, just an idealised version of her that he calls Laura). Both women are given active point of view sections in this book, which allows the reader to really get to know them and understand their lives. I would have liked a lot more from Annalaura after Alexander McNaughton begins to rape her, because I wanted to see her feelings about their relationship revealed. Clearly by the end of the book the time they spend together has become more than rape, but how did she reach that state of mind? I thought that the reader had much more access to Eula Mae’s troubled internal feelings. Hearing her inner thoughts humanised and developing the dull, obedient woman Alexander sees, into a person only the reader knows. Not that Annalaura isn’t taken past the image the men in her life have of her in the sections the reader gets access to their inner thoughts, it’s just that as the character the book begins with and the woman who seems to be the heart of the book, I might have expected the book to give even more space to her perspective.

To finish, just a (longish) note on the book’s writing. I started ‘Page from a Tennessee Journal’ a while ago and was put off by the immediate clunky exposition of the first paragraph:

‘Annalaura Welles stirred out of her fitful sleep to the certainty of two things. Husband John was gone for good this time, and even with the help of her four young children, she would be unable to bring in the tobacco harvest by the end of August. Though this was coming up the second year she’d sharecropped the McNaughton mid-forty, she still wasn’t used to living in the converted upper reaches of a barn.’

Sure, this paragraph serves a purpose. It gets a lot of necessary information across quickly: who the protagonist is (Annalaura Welles); what her circumstances are (a woman with four children living above a barn); information about her past (troubled marriage with a man who has left before and now seems to have left permanently) and what the major conflict in her life is (the inability to harvest enough tobacco). It introduces points of interest, which is supposed to intrigue the reader into wanting to continue with the story, for example the reader might wonder who are the McNaughton’s and where has John Welles gone.

Unfortunately there is a lot of information contained in this three sentence paragraph, which is a relatively cramped portion of writing space considering all the facts and information the reader is supposed to absorb. The paragraph is overburdened with more background context than it is capable of encompassing comfortably. The reader’s rhythm is disrupted by the author’s decision to overstuff this first paragraph with straight forward info dumps and attempts to naturally link two rather dramatic declarations with a sentence about living in a barn. This paragraph has the effect of making the novel sound like it is blurting out information, hurling it at the reader rather desperately, with no regard for elegance, as if the narrative thinks it needs to hand the reader all the information they could possibly need or they will leave. The effect of reading it is kind of like when you meet a stranger on the bus who tells you their whole life story in a loud voice, without pausing for breath. Book, you are making me uncomfortable!

I know how important the first sentence can be to help readers decide whether they’re going to pick up a book and continue reading it, so if this passage sounds as shouty and desperate to you as it did to me, can I just say please, please persevere. The rest of the writing is not like this at all. There are a couple of other awkward moments of exposition, but nothing on the scale of other books I’ve reviewed here before (naming no names, but you probably know which ones I’m talking about). For the most part ‘Page from a Tennessee Journal’ is written in an easy to read, solid and inviting style. It’s a good piece of storytelling and I’ve spent so long going on about my problems with the first paragraph so I can explain that the rest of the book is written with much greater naturalness, because I don’t want people to be put off and miss out on this historical novel.

Of course I could just have kept my mouth shut and only talked about all the bits I liked in the novel instead.

And wow, I just called the book ‘good’, which sounds kind of a pathetic word in this world of ‘awesome’ and ‘fantabulousness’. We should rehabilitate the word good…

Shut up brain, over thinking does not help! : P

So, overall a good historical novel, that makes me want to start reading more historical fiction again, because the world within was conjured so well. It’s a book that erases some of the disappointing experiences I’ve had with historical fiction recently, which have irrationally kept me from returning to the genre. And yet, still, not a book that encouraged me to feel sympathetic towards less than sympathetic characters. Zetta Elliot and the author, Francine Thomas Howard discuss John Welles in an interview at Amazon, but I’m curious to know, how does everyone else feel about the men in this book?

Other Reviews

BookLust
Brown Girl Speaks
rhapsody in books

‘Now I sit toying with the idea that maybe life is a game after all, a game we play just once. I am coming round to Sarah’s view, perhaps. But if life is a game then it has no practises; no training; no preliminary rounds. It is a game played on the principle of sudden death. And to play it properly, to play it fairly and well, we need all the strength that self-knowledge, courage, will and discipline can impart. At twenty-two I had not yet learned to take life seriously; to know that it is not like other games; that it matters who wins and who loses; and that how they win and lose matters also. I had no idea that victory could be Pyrrhic; nor did I know that the end seldom justifies the means. I could not have known any of this without experience, and of that I had none. I was innocent; and innocent of my innocence.’

Here is an example of the dark, self- flagellating foreshadowing that makes Richard Mason’s debut novel ‘The Drowning People’ so creepily compelling. Mason’s narrator uses an over blown gothic style of narrative that is appropriate for a story which contains a family plagued by insanity, dark secrets and a castle on a private island that is the cause of much jealousy.

The seventy year old narrator, who tells the story of his life, continually makes much of the guilt he feels now and the terrible secrets that he is privy to, which his younger self did not have the foresight to anticipate:

‘He knows no remorse; no shame; no despair. I resent him. He, who thinks himself so fine, does not move as I question him. He sits by the river in an endless idle dream, as I beg for signs I might have seen, for warnings I might have heeded. But still he sits, moving only to toss a pebble into the fast-flowing waters. He pays no attention to the ramblings of an old man; he does not hear them. And I am left helpless, watching.’

He dwells on the terrible lessons he has learnt from the past without revealing the full substance of these secrets to the reader. His words in this passage convey a sense of extreme foreboding to the reader, heightening the tension of the novel. And trust me, by this point in the novel the reader is already hanging from the window ledge by their finger nails as they peer in fearfully at an old man, in a high castle who at the beginning of the novel admitted quite calmly to having shot his wife.

Now, imagine reading a whole novel of such prose. Imagine the first moment you snag on the overly melodramatic nature of these weary, foreshadowing monologues full of strong urging to heed the lessons of the narrator’s experience. Imagine the moment when the seductive spell of high emotion wears off and the mechanics of the novel become much more visible. All you can hear is that ticking of the clockwork and it starts to drive you to distraction.

Look ‘The Drowning People’ is a lovely, deep novel of self-analysis. The narrator is earnest. He determinedly examines his memories to expose the deepest truths of life. It is full of passages of good, sensible realisations, like ‘I was wrong. No love is worth that. No human being is worth the total abdication of the self.’ which may seem simple and obvious to readers with experience, but still conveys a meaningful truth. He conveys both the rigour of his approach and the unflinching nature of his analysis, by using confident, clear, definite phrases that convey how little he spares himself, for example:

‘The ease with which my ties of friendship with Eric dissolved under Ella’s influence shames me now. Then I’m almost certain that I didn’t. And as I talk I remember why it didn’t. I remember the tricks I used to bypass all considerations that might have weakened my resolution, the cunning by which my possessed mind protected itself and its intentions from all complicating scruple…’

This character analysis is shaped around a thrilling plot, full of twists and secrets which truly are shocking. And even in its quieter moments, during the clear, detailed establishment of the novel’s world and the aftermath of dreadful events where the narrator tries to set his life back into some sort of recognisable form, it’s very compelling. The narrator also shows a keen awareness of the way that the other people around him work. It is an unbelievable conceit to set this novel, with its high level of awareness of meaning, as an obsessive one night reconstruction of memories locked away for years, but I could happily let that go.

However, it is not a book I’d recommend to readers who like subtlety. Perhaps you have gathered from the quotes above that Mason’s narrator really like to bang a lesson, or a feeling home. And there is little room for reader’s imagination to interact with the text, as every single image highly described. There’s never just a ball, it must be ‘a scarlet ball’, never just a scarf only ‘a gauzy scarf’. Let me show you the effect this has on one short phrase, where every object must be accompanied by a descriptor, for example ‘the shadowy staircase bathed in short bursts of inadequate light’. That’s not a huge deal, in fact the description is technically probably very accomplished, and it’s personal taste that leads me to find it distracting and a little bit intrusive. When you’re under the spell of the novel, reading faster and faster to find out what in the hell happens, none of these little tics matter, but once you notice it you notice it all the damn time.

I read this book in two days, started noticing this kind of things about a hundred pages from the end and still managed to hugely enjoy ‘The Drowning People’. It’s a fun book to read, despite a male narrator who as you can probably tell is rather self-obsessed and seems to be rather saved by his author, rising higher and higher professionally while he weeps of suffering, in comparison to his girlfriend whose suffering leads to her break down and incarceration. An interesting novel to read then, but perhaps not written in a style that stands close analysis.

Last month I was lucky enough to get to read ‘When God Was a Rabbit’ by Sarah Winman with that most generous of book bloggers, litlove from ‘Tales from the Reading Room’. Based on an ordinary seeming family, the novel follows Elly, her brother Joe and the rest of their family, as they get on with the business of living. Elly gets a pet rabbit and makes a best friend called Jenny Penny. Her brother finds joy in rugby and falls in love with boy named Charlie. Their father and mother are happy together, even though their father is weighed down by some heavy guilt that follows him from the past. They form sturdy familial bonds and at yet spend plenty of time defining themselves as separate people. It all sounds like the normal stuff of novels centred on the important events of a domestic environment.

So, what if I told you that Elly’s rabbit is named God who talks to her? Suddenly we’re in the land of magical realism, something that litlove and I talked a lot about in the e-mails we exchanged as we went along.

I’ve never explored the theory behind magical realism and sometimes feel like it sits in a funny kind of opposition to the ‘rules’ of other fantasy writing. Most fantasy novels contain a set of internally logical rules set up by the author that govern how magic works. If the author wants to overcome limitations imposed by those rules they must find logical ways to do so. Any part of a fantasy novel that amounts to ‘By the way, this thing that I have never mentioned before means that magic works in this convenient, plot facilitating way’ is generally given a suspicious side eye, with good reason, illogical circumvention of the rules undermines reader confidence in the fantasy land they’re being asked to believe in and the emotional reality of a story.

To me, magical realism seems to be made out of the kind of hand wavy supernatural that is unacceptable in the fantasy genre. ‘When God Was a Rabbit’ certainly includes convenient fortuitous events a plenty, along with unexplained magic. One day Elly’s family wins the football pools, which makes them wildly rich and saves her father from a total breakdown. Jenny Penny shows Elly she can pull fifty pence pieces out of her arm. A rabbit appears just when everyone needs a symbol of hope. Still I felt like it would be hugely arrogant to write off magical realism, just because it’s concept of fantasy seemed a little woolly to me. I was pretty sure I just didn’t have the context to understand how it worked and I wanted to understand how litlove was interpreting the nebulous strain of unexplained magic that ran through ‘God Was a Rabbit’, so I asked:

bookgazing: ‘…Are you thinking that we're being presented with a childs eye view of the world and the occasional magical happenings aren't really taking place/take on a different appearance for adults? Or do you think this is a more straight forward piece of magical realism that wants the reader to buy into the reality of the magical stuff? The fifty pence piece moment has me wondering, because as an adult reader I automatically think she's self harming' and the author is obscuring this from us through Eli lack of understanding. But it's a coin from the future...

And are you just going with the flow with the sort of unbelievable bits of the plot like the football pools win? I don't feel inclined to analyse this novel through expectations of realism at all for some reason.’

litlove: ‘The talking rabbit I was inclined to put down as a child's-eye-view. But the 50 pence piece from the arm is on another level altogether (and yukky). I found myself examining my arm and wondering if it were even possible. I completely agree that it tends to send out messages of self-harm, even if it isn't supposed to be literal, the image domain it comes from seems to make that implication. Magic realism used (in the good old days) to be about alternative kinds of power, arising from folklore and magic, that were the preserve of suppressed, indigenous people. It began as a very political tool, rewriting history from the perspective of the oppressed. So in a sense children make good vehicles for magic realism as they have no actual power, but often believe very strongly in animistic powers, or forms of magical thinking.’

At this point in the conversation I was enjoying the book, but unsure how to read much of it, which is why litlove’s explanation of magical realism was so helpful. The idea that Elly, a child who has a lot of her power and voice stripped from her by an adult at the beginning of the book and Jenny Penny, who is a pretty powerless little girl (although we don’t find out the extent of her childhood powerlessness until the end of the book) were both being given power by the author, seemed in theory to fit with the tradition of magical realism.

One thing I like about book blogging – the chance to pick up bits of knowledge from smart people. I was given a glimpse of what magical realism was all about and suddenly it all seemed to make a lot more sense. And yet, as litlove said, and yet... Despite the fact that both Elly and Jenny Penny are children who have had their power taken away from them it’s hard to see how the magical realism in this novel, gives the girls their power back:

litlove: ‘I can't make that sit happily with the narrative, for no real logical reason, other than the 50p thing doesn't feel powerful, it just feels messed up (at least, to me). The rest of the set piece events - like winning the lottery - seem more derived from farce, along the lines of Voltaire's Candide, where all these mad things just happen and the cast of characters struggle along with them as best they can.

And it made me think that the magic realism parts are particularly there to bridge the gaps. I hope I'm not giving away too much if I say that there is a happy ending which resolves a lot of difficulties. Looking back over the story, it seemed to me that when there was too much sorrow or incomprehension for the children to bear, there was something magical to tide them over, or distract them from the everyday.’

As the book progressed I found myself feeling ever more strongly that the magical realism element of the book was working as litlove said and was giving some hope to the characters and reader. At the same time some other things about the book felt kind of forced.

bookgazing: ‘I finished 'God Was a Rabbit' yesterday and have mixed reactions to different bits of the book, much like you. I have to say that although I could feel some connection with the emotions of the characters and a lot more connection during the second part, it felt like a book that relied heavily on the hand wavy method of story telling. The emotion was strong, but the technique was not. Terribly convenient things happened at convenient times…which for me could push the magical realism into tweeness. Yet I was fine with the rabbit reappearing at convenient times and love your idea that 'when there was too much sorrow or incomprehension for the children to bear, there was something magical to tide them over, or distract them from the everyday.' so there must be more to my reaction, but I can't quite fathom it yet.’

I spent time enjoying the relationships between characters. I liked that Winman has included several different types of relationships (ploy amorous emotional love, friendship between old and young) and sexualities (two gay characters and one lesbian, none of whom die) in a way that emphasised how easy growing up with non-traditional people can be. The gaps in Winman’s narrative reasoning allowed me the space and time to interact with the text. However, there was no getting away from the fact that at times ‘When God Was a Rabbit’ confused me.

It seemed to me that as litlove and I talked we kept getting drawn back to some kind of central disconnect that the mixture of magical realism and the accumulation of happy accidents. A family friend who is blind has his sight returned to him when a coconut (the object a psychic predicted would kill him) is thrown at his head. Elly’s brother loses his memory only to have it return just as his sister has stormed off, after giving up hope. Something did not feel emotionally real in these events and I resented it. Ever cynical me said:

bookgazing: ‘I don't want to seem like I'm the kind of reader who thinks a happy ending is a cop out, but I do think some books about some subjects require characters to be put through the wringer. The characters here got off really easily, even though they were involved in some terrible events and for a while seemed to be about to go off the edge. I wasn't so bothered by Charlie coming home safely from his kidnapping and managing to live a normal life, but the point where her brother’s memory came back really rubbed me wrong….the return of memory in this book feels dreadfully perfect. Just when she begins to give up on him forever, he redeems himself under the effect of a good, stern talking to! It felt like Winman pulled back from the brink of the real tragedy of memory loss and the real way people manage to rebuild too soon to conjure something true. She's so close...but, no, it's too scary, so she pulls her novel back.

and litlove followed up by saying that

litlove: ‘I think what feels a bit odd is that we begin with this stream of disasters (with the occasional triumph) that look completely arbitrary and random. Well, okay, if that's the representation of choice of destiny, so be it. But then that seems to be interwoven with another strand of super-convenient events that have the contrived artificiality of the most plotted fictions. I think it makes it hard to know how to read what happens.

The novel is definitely trying to trigger the reader's sense of poignancy (and that may be a problem - it overdoes it a bit, like poking a bruise to see if it still hurts, but not letting up until it's numb), but I think we have to be won over either by the character (which is a possibility here, there are some endearing characters) or by the sense of truth in the unfolding of the plot. I have this huge admiration for novels that make me feel, yes, that is exactly what it would be like, that is just how it would happen. Now that's not the kind of novel we're dealing with I don't think, although all the quotes seem to want to push for the emotional veracity of the story. But add that to magic realism and swirl it around a bit and you've got a funny old cocktail. I think that as I look back on the book now, I feel that it mixed things together that shouldn't really go together. So you had good bits and not so good bits.’

That is pretty much how I ended up feeling about ‘When God Was a Rabbit’. Kind of frustrated happy if that’s a thing. It was lovely to see everything work out so well, but do I ever wish it could have worked out just as well and felt more emotionally real.

It was an absolute treat to get to discuss a book in detail with litlove as she was forming her initial impressions. It was also so much fun to talk about other things. One of the things I like best about the book bloggers I meet is how happy they are to talk about all kinds of things, how books lead on to other subjects and how at the same time that never distracts from the books at hand. We could easily have run away with ourselves and only talked about the Rigsby/ Van Pelt ship in The Mentalist (alright maybe I could have run away with myself and gone on about tv, while she politely replied) or we could have been strict and kept just to bookish questions. Instead we talked about a whole bunch of things including the book and I feel like I got my own private time with the whole of the personality I see appearing every week on her blog. It was such a lovely experience and one I hope we’ll get to repeat again.

You can hear what litlove thought of the book at 'Tales from the Reading Room'.