Some Very Private Parts! (The Private Parts of Women - Lesley Glaister)

Member Name: wendybull

Product:	The Private Parts of Women - Lesley Glaister
Date:	13/09/07 (247 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Interesting to read about something new.

Disadvantages: Could have expanded on the thriller side more

Where do I start? This book was described as a thriller on a book hopping site I belong to and it grabbed my attention because of the title which you have to agree is a little eye catching!

Inis has left her husband and children completely out of the blue and run away to Sheffield to live on her own and work through some of her problems. Her new next door neighbour is an elderly lady called Trixie, who seems quiet enough and is happy to keep to herself. This is fine with Inis who also wishes to remain an anonymous human in the world right now.

However things soon begin to take an unfamiliar path with this novel when Trixie allows us to see that she has multiple personalities and some are nicer than others.



I was totally attracted to the idea of reading about multiple personalities and knew I would enjoy the changing characters they brought but I did feel the author could have gone that bit further with this idea. The chapters were broken down into different characters, from Inis to Trixie mainly, but Trixie's alter egos also had a look in with sections devoted to them when they were in control of Trixie. However this was just not enough in my opinion. I would have been especially interested in the character of a youngish boy – the nasty side of Trixie’s personalities and instead we only got snippets of feelings from him and most of these were short, unfinished sentences or sentences that didn’t quite read in proper English. He was obviously a very naughty boy when Trixie was younger but it became clear through the story that he was a particularly bad part of Trixie as they progressed through her life and I would have loved to have read a more in depth story line behind this side of her.

Trixie’s other personality was Ava, a gorgeous sex mad woman, who was not afraid to get what she wanted – usually a man and most recently Mr Blowski – the elderly Pole from the shoe menders who she had been having encounters with for a very long time. She loved to dress up and flirt and this was brought across very well indeed through the writing. I got a very clear picture of Ava and what she would have been like when she came to the front of Trixie. I also enjoyed reading how Trixie coped when she came back to herself and realised she had a missing period. Finding herself in clothing and makeup that a true God loving Salvationist such as herself would never wear. I was never really quite sure whether Trixie was aware of her alter egos or not though. Maybe I missed it but the author, Glaister, never fully implied that she knew there were others inside her and that they came to the front sometimes, pushing her back to where she could not even remember what had happened.

Inis was a much more mundane character, although she had parts of herself that were slowly revealed through the book and I felt that Lesley Glaister must have had experience of the problems Inis was suffering – post natal depression being my honest guess – as she wrote so convincingly and made Inis appear so normal with her troubles that it felt very real. Of course, never having suffered from this myself I could be totally wrong but the normal everyday things she describes, which I always found difficult after having children, did come across as very true to life.

I think the contrast between Trixie and Inis was cleverly done. Inis being so normal and almost boring and Trixie being so completely opposite. I found this to be exciting and sort of eagerly awaited each chapter for the different characters so it could reveal another dose of normality and everyday problems that I could associate with or problems that were way beyond my comprehension. I was glad the chapters were split between the characters, with each one telling the story from that characters’ perspective, but I did feel they were hard to distinguish sometimes as there were no chapter headings and until you got a few paragraphs into the chapter it was sometimes hard to tell who you were reading as, especially if the chapters had been punctuated with a brief dose of an alter-ego.

I felt at times this was more a revealing of characters rather than a story as there didn’t seem to be a specific build up within the story for anything, and nothing major happened through the book, until the end when it comes to a peak, although this was slightly disappointing after the almost "routineness" of the rest of the story. However, it was intriguing and I was happy to carry on reading, at no time finding it a chore but felt the ending could have been more explosive to counteract the diary effect of the rest. There were some dark parts to this novel however that did give me goose bumps and I think it would have been an excellent thriller if these sections had been explored more thoroughly and we had been given more detail.

However, having said that I was glad I read this book and enjoyed it. It was something different that I had not really experienced before and an author I would probably read again to see if this is her normal style.

Available from Amazon for around the £5.00 mark new or used from a 1p.

Summary: Recommended to try.