The ravings of a mad woman perhaps? (After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell)

Member Name: moo2moo

Product:	After You'd Gone - Maggie O'Farrell
Date:	19/09/09 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Completely gripping if you can get into it

Disadvantages: Unbelievably difficult to get your teeth into

Beautifully constructed... unashamedly passionate claims the front cover. OH god I thought. Yet another trashy romance novel. Still I opened the front cover and read the opening line "The day she would try to kill herself, she realised winter was coming again." Perhaps not a romance after all.

The novel leaps backwards and forwards in time without warning leaving you re-reading pages as you've just twigged where and when you are to give it some relevance to where you are as opposed to where you thought you were. Its not something you can read late at night when you're tired or with distractions around you.

You'd be forgiven for considering abandoning the book at the end of part one as a completely absurd eclectic and downright random collection of loosely related short stories which don't seem to follow any logical pattern and whose only common link is the books central character Alice. The book lurches between the use of the first and third person as narrative which only adds to the confusion.

If you stick with it long enough to find out why this occurs you end up with a poigniant tale of one womans life and loves as she surfaces in and out of conciousness within a coma. It is incredibly well written but it took me three attempts over several months to get beyond the first 60 pages. Had it not been for a friends insistance that its a fabulous novel I really wouldn't have bothered.

Summary: Once in a while persistance pays off but there are many many better novels out there