'Then' by Julie Myerson

[RemusLupinsBiggestGroupie]

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.

Nobody?

Scared the crap out of me.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.