BookWorm

Decent writing, but meandering and a lot of loose ends, 11 May 2013

Black Mamba Boy is what I think of as a 'road' story - a book concerned with a journey. The protagonist, Jama, is a Somali boy who travels around the middle east and east Africa during the time around the Second World War. The writing is very descriptive - a bit overly descriptive for my taste - and it evokes the atmosphere of the many countries, cities and landscapes featured vividly. Jama is a likeable enough character but the writing doesn't enable the reader to truly love him, which I think would be necessary to carry a story of this kind where the only constant feature is the young hero. The nature of the story is in many ways its weakness. Jama moves through so many countries and… Read more

Some good writing, but let down by the structure, 7 May 2013

A good, but not great book, which it would be easy to criticise with faint praise. It suffers somewhat from its structure, which undermines what could have been a more emotionally powerful story. Set on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, it opens with a section written in the third person, centred on an elderly white couple still living in Trinidad in 2006. Around a third of the way through it switches to the first person and narrates the story of how they came to the island in its colonial days, and lived through the turbulence of independence. The second section is by far the more effective. The characters at the beginning are hard to like and their motivations aren't easy to… Read more

Decent holiday read - provided you're not going on a cruise!, 30 April 2013

A decent, but not brilliant, novel set mostly on a lifeboat following the sinking of cruise liner at the start of World War I. Despite the claustrophobic nature of the setting, the story manages to retain pace and interest throughout. It is primarily an exploration of the darker side of human behaviour, as the inhabitants of the lifeboat struggle to survive in such extreme circumstances and close quarters. Faced with life-or-death choices, two factions develop in the boat, threatening the very delicate micro-society. The story is narrated in the first person by Grace, a young newlywed separated from her husband. Later chapters cover the aftermath and consequences of the events at… Read more