Anyone else been disappointed by Maggie OFarrell?

[privateplane]

Friends gave me My lovers lover
After you have gone and The vanishing act of Esme Lennox.
Expected greatness but found them all truly bland.

I really liked After you have gone, but none of her others.

I find her books addictive and whizz through them but yes, they do leave me feeling rather unsatisfied. All the heroines are basically the same - they just have different names and haircuts.

I really enjoyed 'The Hand That First Held Mine' and '...Esme Lennox' so started to read her earlier books but gave up on 'My Lover's Lover', so tedious! Enjoyed 'The Distance Between Us' but that is partly as I love books set in Edinburgh. Think I'll give her a rest for a while as I'm finding them all a bit similar - the moving constantly between past and present and between voices.

I'll never read another M O'F. I quite enjoyed the part of Esme Lennox that dealt with the past, but I'd have been happier with that story standing on its own and didn't feel that weaving in the modern-day strand added anything. Then I read The Hand that First Held Mine and found it very samey.

RBJT, I agree with your comment about moving between past and present - this is a real bugbear of mine at the moment. Every second novel I pick up seems to use this narrative technique and I'm finding it really tired. I don't want to spend the first few paragraphs of each chapter trying to puzzle out who's the narrator. It's supposed to be clever but IMO it's just lazy writing. One of the reasons I'm reading more older, classic novels just now. Madame Bovary, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Middlemarch .. great characters and plots, really well written with no daft narrative tricks.

I started with Since you've been gone and loved it. Nothing since has been half as enjoyable for me. Sorry Maggie!

I've read a few but I honestly couldn't tell you which ones or what the plots were as they were all so bland and drippy feeling. Had to go on a train journey recently and grabbed a book off shelf before I left. My heart sank when I realised it was a MO'F one (from a charity shop)

I really like her books Esp after you'd gone
certainly she has thematic reference points she revisits each book,but I don't mind that really

Thanks for putting the title right it's been a long time since I read it!

After you'd gone is one of my favorite books but I do take on board the fact that they are all a bit samey - she has a very distinctive voice and frame of reference which she seems to be exploring very thoroughly... I tend not to mind that though - I will forgive her anything, I think, since she writes so movingly about what mourning someone you love is like.

I think she is a TERRIBLE, two-dimensional, predicable and boring writer. Someone gave me "After you'd gone" and I still shudder at how awful it was.

I think she's pretty dull. I found After You'd Gone quite 'meh' the first time I read it. I don't know what possessed me to pick it up and read it again a couple of years later but I did and I enjoyed it much more on the second read. I began reading The Distance Between Us last year and it's still half-read, sitting abandoned by the bed.

I want to like her more but after my O'Farrell experience thus far I expect to find all her other books vaguely unsatisfying.

I like them all apart from The Hand ..., which I found very uninvolving. I think she is a quite middlebrow and samey writer in terms of themes and characters, but don't mind that per se.

It's ghastly chic lit at its best.