to everyone who is having a tough time at the moment.
A few more reviews from me:
41. The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood
I was one of the people who very much enjoyed The Thursday Murder Club and assumed that this would be in the same vein (older people become embroiled in a murder and exasperate the police by investigating it and using their specialised knowledge to solve the crime). Well, it wasn't - it was tired, cosy tosh, without an ounce of the wit or humanity that made TTMC enjoyable. The characters are paper thin stereotypes, and it's obviously written for people who last connected with modern life in 1972 (everything is painstakingly spelled out, and one character uses a "tablet computer", presumably to avoid confusion with aspirin). The mystery is pretty lacklustre, although it perks up considerably in the last 20% of the book, which was frustrating. Worst of all, the main character is a crossword compiler, and much is made of how this gives her a special insight into detection, but there is no real depth in the way this is handled (I am a wannabe cryptic crossword setter myself, and was very disappointed in this aspect of the book). I bought this in a Kindle 99p sale but still feel mildly cheated.
42. In Black and White by Alexandra Wilson
Alexandra Wilson is a barrister who hit the news when she tweeted that she kept being mistaken in court for the defendant rather than the brief (Wilson is a young, black woman). This is a short but heartfelt book about her journey to becoming a barrister (inspired by a cousin who was fatally stabbed at 17 when he was caught in the middle of a gang dispute), and about the ways in which the British justice system fails black people, working class people and women. She is eloquent and persuasive about the need for diversity among barristers and judges, and about the need for defendants to see more people like them (rather than just publicly-educated white men). However, her relative inexperience shows: most of the book was about her pupillage (training/internship) year, and I would love to see her write a follow-up when she’s got more cases under her belt.
43. The Tent, the Bucket and Me by Emma Kennedy
From 1970 to 1979 (when she was between 3 and 13 years old), Emma Kennedy's family went on camping holidays in the UK and France, each of them cursed by a series of increasingly bizarre mishaps. This book recounts each of those holidays in hilarious, rain-sodden, scatalogical detail, interspersed with lashings of period detail (we follow her family's attempts to better themselves by moving from Stevenage to Hitchin, holidaying in France and buying furniture from Habitat). I suspect that many of her anecdotes are embellished for humorous reasons but it's clear that there's a solid nugget of turd in there to be polished (and be warned: there are a LOT of turd-related disasters in this book, as well as buckets of piss, copious vomiting incidents, amusing misunderstandings with French yokels, and many (avoidable) incidents caused by laissez-faire 70s parenting). I read it on a campsite in Norfolk and laughed my head off throughout (and hugely appreciated my comfortable tent - not made from mildewed canvas and rusty steel poles – as well as the nearby, clean toilet block and the balmy weather).