Julia owes her success as a writer to her studies with the OU and encouragement from tutors. Cuckoo is her debut novel although her second, Every Vow You Break, has just hit the shelves and she's currently working on her third.
This is the Amazon blurb on Cuckoo...
A dark, juicy, deliciously unsettling, read-it-in-one-sitting psychological drama.Rose has it all - the gorgeous children, the husband, the beautiful home. But then her best friend Polly comes to stay. Very soon, Rose's cosy world starts to fall apart at the seams - her baby falls dangerously ill, her husband is distracted - is Polly behind it all? It appears that once you invite Polly into your home, it's very difficult to get her out again...
So, you have until the end of June 2012 to grab/buy/borrow/download a copy, read the book and post your review here on this forum. Whether you loved it, hated it or only skimmed the first few chapters before giving up, we want to hear from you.
The review we like best scoops £20 in book vouchers. So get reading!
And don't forget to add your suggestions for future book club reads in this forum thread.
Comments
The blurb on the back cover tells you that the best friend will steal our heroine’s husband. So I arduously read the entire book expecting a twist at the end where heroine saves herself and her hubby from the clutches of another woman. The twist never came; the story is as stated by the blurb. So why bother reading the novel? It was hard reading, believe me. From having to endure accounts of the heroine’s boring life (making breakfast, taking kids to school) to the cast of unlikable characters.
First there’s the husband. He tells the heroine that he prefers her best friend because she only sees him as a meal ticket. Excuse me but you don’t have a job, instead you paint. Your wife owns the house and is going to work part time to pay the bills.
Then there’s the adulterous best friend. I was expecting somebody really beautiful and dazzling. Instead she’s an emancipated drug addict.
Finally, by far the worst character is our heroine. A dweeb who idolizes her best friend. Who takes illegal drugs then goes to the primary school to teach. At the end of the book, as expected, the heroine kills her husband. In real life the heroine would have been arrested. In the safety of the book she moves to France.
Ooh, spoiler alert Uzma!
I actually really enjoyed this book and whizzed through it in a weekend. I do agree though that the characters are irritating - Rose because of her weakness and her friend because of her nasty streak. But people can be irritating (and make a lot of mistakes) and this is fiction after all, and it was the frustration I had with the main characters and desperation to know how the situation rectified itself that kept me reading. It's not often that I read a book in a weekend but I couldn't put this one down, there was just something about it that forced me to turn the pages. I'd definitely recommend it and look forward to reading Julia's second novel.
I'm not really sure what I thought of this novel! It starts out well and I thought that we were going to be introduced to some interesting themes. For instance the fact that our old friends are important to us, but at the same time might know things about us that we don't want to bring into new relationships. The sense of veiled threat was good, but I thought it was not developed. I also thought the mother's instinct to protect her children came across strongly.
Beyond that, I'm afraid I thought it all became a bit absurd - like a bad blockbuster movie! Having just complted A150 which addresses creative writing and how to write succinctly, I coundn't help but feel time and again that it just needed a good edit - too many words!!! It just didn't quite deliver what I expected at first, which was a shame.
Congrats to Caroline... £20 in book tokens are in the post to you.
Robyn
Platform Editor