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'Then' by Julie Myerson

7 replies

RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie · 25/09/2011 16:55

Has anybody read it? What did you think?

I read it last week after a rec on here and I didn't like it. Hadn't ever read anything of hers before so had no idea what it might be like but I was v disappointed by it.

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RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie · 25/09/2011 18:21

Nobody?

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CharlieMcGee · 25/09/2011 18:51

Scared the crap out of me.

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RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie · 25/09/2011 20:07

Really Charlie?

Obviously the bit with the children was sad but I had so little sympathy for the woman by that point that I was angry with her, rather than upset for her if that makes sense?

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MrsRobertDuvall · 26/09/2011 12:24

I enjoyed it...not normally my sort of book.
I thought it was very clever.

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CharlieMcGee · 26/09/2011 13:58

I think it was the bit with the children that scared me. I thought it was a strange book and didn't really enjoy it but I was just so shook up by what she did it scared me.

It has been a few months since I read it but I still think about it a lot.
I didn't like the woman at all either.

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LadyClariceCannockMonty · 26/09/2011 19:01

I found it an odd mix of her usual 'middle-class angst' themes and, obviously, more unusual themes and settings. I didn't quite know what to make of it, TBH. The writing style and narrator's voice seemed very matter-of-fact and detached; I guess that was meant to reflect the narrator's state of mind but it was hard to sympathise or even, sometimes, to grasp what was going on.

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RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie · 26/09/2011 19:08

Thanks all.

Yes to the rather annoying 'middle class angst' stuff. To be honest, I thought it was far more about that and the whole 'pity me but I want it all' stuff than it was a post-apocalyptic novel and that, in a way, the post-apocalyptic stuff was just her attempt to make it appear to be a better book than it actually was.

She didn't really develop the 'post-apocalyptic world' or the 'disaster' in sufficient detail to make it meaningful - it was just a kind of veneer to try and lift a pretty bad 'female misery' novel into something else, I thought. It was too simplistically realised and too derivative to matter much imho.