Thank you to @womensprize for sending me this book to review! Ordinary People has a lot of the ingredients that usually make a five-star read for me (character-driven plot, motherhood, explorations of race and class in Britain) and yet it ended up just being a middle of the road read. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it, it just... was.
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Although the back of the book claimed to follow the lives of two couples, there was definitely a very strong bias towards one couple, Michael and Melissa, to the point where Stephanie, the woman in the other couple, just felt very 2D and unexplored considering she was meant to be one of the four main characters. Some parts of their relationships were frustrating, some fascinating, some relatable, but also predictable. You can see what’s coming from a mile off so there was no real impact when it did happen.
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The style I did enjoy! I like run-on sentences as they really pull me into a book and make me feel more involved in it. If the balance between the two couples had been more even then that definitely would have made a difference.
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I’m also not sure what to make of the rather bizarre twist at the end where things got very gothic and the house’s role become a lot more pronounced than it had been previously. Was there a ghost? Possession? Hallucination? Post-natal depression? We’ll never know and I don’t know how well it fit the overall tone of the book but it certainly was interesting!
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Overall, it’s clear Evans does have an eye for the minutiae of everyday coupledom and parts of this I really enjoyed for their triviality and humour (the part about Lidl really made me chuckle), and I’d be interested in reading some of her earlier work to compare. Ordinary People just lacked some of the spark I was looking for!