Tuesday, April 05, 2022

Update Week 14 (part 2)

Petrona Award news - made a breakthrough last week and more publishers have submitted their forms, so just one publisher with 2 books to be entered and 3 other books should be in the post. Almost over the finish line - for this stage of the process.

Reading-wise, I finished The Christie Affair. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I found it fairly slow reading. The narrator is Archie Christie's mistress/second wife-to-be, Nan - though she has a different surname and family to the real second Mrs Christie. Nan is able to recount the whole story even when she wasn't present, relying on what the other characters told her later...

Sometimes I struggled to understand a sentence, eg:

"He heard her, and was struck again at the lack of ploy. A beautiful rawness exhibited either her character or what her character had been reduced - or elevated - to, thanks to whatever trauma it was that drove her."

However the final Act does at least reveal why one has to read a whole lot of backstory for Nan and that does raise it to a 3/5 star read for me. The author exhibits some sleight of hand regards the crime in the book though possibly I was not interested enough in the first place to register the appropriate information. Overall I thought the atmosphere was well done.

I'd be interested in what other readers thought about the book.

I've just finished Heartstopper volume 2 by Alice Oseman and have begun E C R Lorac's Post After Post-Mortem.

We've finished watching Star Trek: Discovery so I hope we can get back to some subtitled dramas soon.



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