Book Corner

  The plot twist of the ending WAS pretty good.  I was prepared to give it nothing but scathing, negative comments; but she did pull off a good ending.
But oy, so many tangents!  Too long!  “Oh, you cannot possibly understand Clara without first knowing about Ryan Topps…”  I beg to differ.  We did not need to know one whit about Ryan Topps – it would have made NO difference to the progress of the story whatsoever.
Most of the characters were at least a bit grotesque, and quite incoherent to me.  So much inexplicable conversion to religious fanaticism (Samad, Millat, Ryan Topps).  I only liked Irie, and Niece-of-Shame – I LOVED Niece-of-Shame.  And I loved Irie’s speech telling off her family at the end – I love when annoying characters get put in their place.
But everyone else?  Samad?  Was he a good sympathetic guy, or a religious fanatic – if a religious fanatic, why did he become upset when his son also because a religious fanatic?  Millat – a bad boy, yet, joins a religious cult?  Clara – a sex bomb walking down the stairs, and then all this back history about her being ugly, and then, what of her?  She had no personality.
Things started to wear thin for me with the tangent of the Chelfins, and towards the end when Irie has sex with both twins (in succession) on one night, I decided I hated it – by that time, things felt genuinely random, and I can’t abide reading something where it seems that at any moment literally anything can happen.
Thankfully, as I said, it was tied together at the end (though I hate when pregnancy is used as a tie-together part of an ending, even a small part as here); it had a real conclusion, overlaying everything prior with SOME point.  But I’ve definitely spent a better 448 pages in my life.