943 reviews by:

katymaryreads


I loved this book, and Tom Hanks' reading of it brought it vividly to life. In turn I felt compassion, pity, irritation, frustration and understanding for the characters, who were all so well portrayed. I've not really been a fan of audiobooks before, but this was so good it might have converted me.

A lovely gentle easy read, that made me smile and made me hungry!

I am not sure that this book has converted me to the graphic novel format, but I did enjoy it. I found the format somehow harder to stick to than a conventional novel, with the result that I read this in fits and starts, putting it down for a while and then having to read back a bit to remember where I'd got to.
Having said that, I enjoyed (not sure that's quite the right word) this book, and the stylised artwork was perfect for the story. Many things, particularly in the earlier part of the book, resonated with my own childhood as the author and I are much the same age.
I am fortunate that her accounts of sexual abuse did not resonate personally with me, but they were enlightening and harrowing, and interspersed perfectly with the account of the reign of terror of the Yorkshire Ripper (which I remember impersonally as a news story that didn't really affect me) and the many failures of the police investigation. thought=provoking too about the role and treatment of women in our society, and how the police (reflecting society as a whole) regarded the victims of the Ripper, particularly those who were sex workers. I would like to think that 30 years or so later we have moved on, but I am not sure that we have entirely.
A worthwhile read.