Author: Frances Whiting
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
I know it’s a novel because it announces itself as such directly there on the cover! I am so grateful for that, because I would never have known otherwise! It's about the relationship between Tallulah de Longland and Annabelle Andrews, who met when Annabelle strutted into her life at Saint Rita's School for Young Ladies, or as Annabelle insisted upon naming it, Saint Rita's School for Young Lesbians. And no, this isn’t a LGBTQ story, not even close.
This novel is set in Australia. I usually enjoy stories set in Australia because they seem so much like stories set in Britain. That sounds like a back-handed compliment but it's really not - I feel just as much at home reading an Aussie story (though I've never been there) as I do a Brit one. Indeed, it’s even possible to forget the location sometimes, and start feeling like it is set in Britain, but then along comes a reminder, and it trips me right up and it’s a real joy to read like that, ones where you’re being frequently shaken out of your cozy safety zone.
I vacillated (yes, vacillated, I shall have it no other way) over whether to rate this positively or negatively. The story is told in three parts and had it been just part one, presented as a short story, I would have, without question or qualification rated it a winner because part one was brilliant and beautifully-written. Unfortunately, then came parts two and three, and while part two only began a gentle downhill glide, part three tipped-up and dunked the reader into a swamp of maudlin Newbery-medal-winner-wannabe material which frankly colored me green - not with envy but with nausea.
If I were rating only parts two and three, I don't doubt that I would even flushed this novel unfinished. So what to do? I think on balance I have to go negative because I can’t rate only a part of it. As I've said before, I can’t say a book is one third worth reading. It’s either worthy or it's warty. There is no in between. If you can stand the sad betrayal of a main female character, as featured in parts two and three, then you should read this. If you are willing to pay the price of a glorious part one in the currency of a miserable parts two and three, then read it. Otherwise avoid it.
The first third or so was tightly focused and brilliantly written, but then it was like the author lost the thread of it or ran out of ideas, and instead of it being about Annabelle and Tallulah, it became about anything and everything, and was nowhere near as entertaining or as engaging as the first part.
I loved Annabelle, and I liked Tallulah in the first third, but Annabelle essentially disappeared after that, and Tallulah went off in so many different directions it was dizzying, and none of that was anywhere near as engrossing.
A new character, Duncan, showed up, and although the author tried to portray him as a good guy, he was, at his core, no different from Josh-the-Jerk, Tallulah's faithless first love. The only difference was that Tallulah worked for Duncan rather than dated him, and he was older than Josh. Otherwise they were the same person at different stages in life, both equally unsavory. Whereas Josh was shown for exactly what he was, for some reason the author chose to portray Duncan as somehow noble - really a good guy underneath his faithlessness, manic cruelty, and cynicism.
Tallulah's two friends: Stella, the stereotypical (in everything save name) Catholic baby-machine, and Simone, the requisite token lesbian friend. Actually, Tallulah's whole take on lesbianism is interesting to say the least. She's convinced that a woman by the name of Maxine Mathers isn't a lesbian because she spent one night in bed with Duncan. A girl can’t change her mind? Yes, if you want to be strict and technical, that makes her bisexual, but the issue here is that Tallulah seems to be under the impression that sexuality is a binary proposition: on or off, plus or minus, yes or no, one or zero. It’s not.
The novel see-saws back and forth between past - Tallulah's almost idyllic recollections of her long teen-age years with Annabelle - and the hellish present-day which Tallulah has created (and has had created) by two major events, the second of which we learn in the very first chapter: she slept with Annabelle's husband Josh, on their wedding night!
Annabelle the younger has the mildly amusing habit of making word mash-ups such as "glamorgeous" and "tediocre". This is faintly reminiscent of Frankie Landau-Banks's behavior in the eponymous novel by E Lockhart, but that novel was better.
Annabelle's parents are artists with all that artistry brings. They're renowned but retiring, friendly, and warm, and creative, really easy-going, flamboyant and rule-skirting. They also have personal issues with each other.
Annabelle lives in a wondrous house, surrounded by trees and beautiful flowers, and the garden rolls readily down to the water, yet for reasons which only slowly become clear, she prefers to visit Tallulah's house, which is smaller and doubles as the home-base of her father Harry's plumbing business. Her mother, Rose, had a difficult childhood, running away from a disastrous home and being raised in a orphanage where she learned to be an excellent cook and dress-maker. She names her dresses with female names which Annabelle thinks is 'astoundible'. When Rose is wearing her 'Doris' dress, it means she's having a Doris day - and that's not an encouraging sign.
The two young girls become inseparable and get along famously - that is when Annabelle isn't inserting herself a little too presumptuously into Tallulah's life. Even when Tallulah hooks up with Josh - her apparently devoted boyfriend - Annabelle is still very much an integral part of their lives. Anyone a little less gullible than Tallulah might have some pause for thought at this point, but she doesn’t. Nor does she devote enough attention to the most pressing two issues she has with Josh: his desire to bed her, and his desire to travel the world immediately after they graduate. The phrase goes, 'he who hesitates is lost', but that homily, notwithstanding its wording, is not actually gender-specific.
At one point in part three, Tallulah decides to open a B&B, but she does none of the work for it - from what the author writes, that is. Everyone and their uncle pitches in to lend a hand, and Tallulah spends all of her time directing everyone in what to do. She herself, of course, has no time to work on executing her own plans because she's fully-occupied 24/7 in griping about being a bad person who isn’t meritorious of the inevitable attention from the inevitable manly man who shows in the form of outdoors-man Will Barton.
Seriously, why in god's name would any healthy girl ever want to become involved with a city gentleman? Yuck, no! If he doesn’t have a rime of bristles on his chin, a few laugh wrinkles hidden in his tanned outdoors skin, and a really gentle manner despite his rough lifestyle, why the hell would any girl be even remotely interested? Where is your thinking at for goodness sakes?! Shape up now!
Will shows up half-way through and it’s glaringly obvious from the first time his name ever appears that he's destined to bed this flighty Tallulah wench. No surprises there. The fact that he's a jerk who runs off in a huff every time Tallulah, in her self-obsessed flagellation, rebuffs him has no bearing on the matter. Trust me.
The real killer for this getting a positive rating from me was chapter twenty nine and beyond. It took the story right into the crapper. This was, coincidentally, right where I’d started skimming a paragraph here and there because it had become so pathetic and maudlin that I couldn’t stand to read the actual words one by one, so the whole thing became more like a fairy-tale than a real tale and not a good one, either.
It felt to me like the author had sat down, and cynically and calculatingly made a list of what she could do to pull every emotional string she could get her little fingers to, and it was truly pathetic where this went. It was at this point, not coincidentally that I quit reading because I really didn’t care how it ended, even though reading only a few more pages would have told me. I wasn't interested in what had increasingly in parts two and three, become nothing more than an exercise in taking potshots at the easy targets in the fairground-stall of pop-the-hear-strings.
One thing which seemed to me to be definitive of this novel was the interview with the author in the last few pages of the advance review copy I had. In the Adobe Digital Editions version which I was reading, the interview is abruptly cut off at the point where the author is asked who her greatest love was, and she answers "My greatest love would be" and the page ends right there, with no more pages to follow! Lol! It was priceless and really summed-up this novel for me. I think Annabelle might describe this as terminknackered.
When I finally gave up on this I kept asking myself how the writing could have gone from being so brilliant to becoming, as Annabelle might have put it, so tediocre in only 260 pages - pages which took seven years to write, even when writing by numbers! I have no answer to that, and in the end I don’t care. I cannot in good faith recommend this novel.
