francesmthompson's Reviews (976)

Not what I expected... A little slow and not the richly intense prose and emotions I have previously enjoyed in other Alice Hoffman novels. But still fascinating (as it's based on real people) and a book I wanted to finish.

Reading this book felt sluggish and uncomfortable, but considering the story it told, this is perhaps more of a compliment than a criticism... Interesting and different but I'm not sure I'll actively seek out more books by the author.

Beautiful. Moving. Frighteningly original.

While I didn't agree with everything the author said, I related to the majority of his puzzled observations and certainly enjoyed the way the book was put together and kept my interest throughout, even though I'd already read about a lot of the topics he covered. Made me want to embark on my own tour of the Netherlands... but possibly not during carnival season!

I love the author's Instagram account and the extracts she shares there, but it would appear these are the best of the book. If an extra year had been spent on this book, I do believe it would have been amazing. As in, it just needed a little editing, a little growth and A LOT of punctuation... Honestly, what was with the lack of full stops, commas, anything! I mean, punctuation can be poetic too!

Sooo this woman can write about nature in my most favourite of ways... by not writing about it like it's nature. And the impressions she gave me of Orkney were multi-sensory, what a trip I had reading all about the islands, the weather, the wildlife and the sound of the corncrake. Somewhat conversely, Liptrot can also write exceptionally well about being young and part of a crowd in London. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if our paths crossed somewhere in East London a decade ago, but where I fell for the book was in the brutally honest, raw and open way she writes about her addictions and her recovery.
My one niggle, which sadly lasted throughout, was the loose use of time. I couldn't always place where she was, what was happening and when things related to other events. It left me a little disoriented, especially as the majority of the book was written in present tense. Perhaps this was deliberate to invoke the same sense of confusion she must have felt at so many stages in her journey, but it just left me wanting a timeline in the inside of the cover to refer to. Still, I think this will be one of my favourite books of the year... lovely.

Soooo... I wanted to love this, and I wanted it to answer perhaps more questions than any book can answer (I mean, how do you teach a two-year old boundaries without using the word "no"... hmm?), but while I loved the over-arching principle that discipline is an opportunity to develop or educate rather than restrict or "punish", there were too few examples for younger not-yet-conversational children, which is the stage I'm at and it's already proving a challenge. I also felt it fell into a lot of parenting/self-help book traps by 1) having a long-winded introduction about how much the book is going to help us (repeating this again and again) and 2) including too many way-too-convenient examples that I deemed a little unrealistic at best or manipulated/contrived at worst. That's not to say I don't believe the research and the message - I DO! Hence the 3 stars - but I feel it could have all been neatly summarised in a blog post, not a book...

Not what I expected, but very enjoyable nonetheless, or maybe because of this. Particularly loved the very subtle way a pivotal moment or event in the plot was referred to in passing, often many decades after we'd left that time period in the narrative... Just a nice, easy but still thought-provoking read.
All that said, I didn't enjoy just how wildly sexist some of the male characters were and also how much was made about Beverly's beauty, like that was the planet around which everything rotated in many ways, and also why was nothing more made of how violent one of the children was when they were little, I felt sure that should have been handled in their adult relationships...