Reading my February choice for Circle of Pine Trees 'The Year in Books' post accidentally crept into March. This happened for a number of reasons, one being that unfortunately my life hasn't had much room in it for reading, as much as I've being trying to carve out the odd few minutes here and there, and secondly that I just stopped finding it compelling.
When I first started reading, I was totally hooked, and found myself reading beautiful sentences aloud to my husband. However, in my February post I wrote that I was beginning to find the writing a bit irksome, and this feeling intensified the more I read. There's almost too much going on, simple sentences are fluffed out with lots of adjectives, and the smilies and metaphors (beautiful as many of them are) are so frequent I stopped appreciating their beauty and found they just got on my nerves.
It's a shame, because the story is great and, as I said, Joanna Cannon has a real way with descriptive writing, but there was just too much flowery language, and not enough depth to the characters for me. I think if you're into a mystery, it's worth reading for the 'whodunnit' (which I won't give away) storyline and there is some really stunning imagery, but I didn't love it like I wanted to.
So, onto my March choice! I can confidently say I am the only person reading this title this month (well, as part of the challenge anyway!)
It's called 'Rut' and is the debut novel from my very talented, very best friend in the world Laura. She wrote it last November during NaNoWriMo (yup, 50,000 words in one month!) and I don't think I'm being biased when I say it's awesome! I'll review properly when I reveal my choice for April, but if you'd like to read some of Laura's work, you can find some short stories here.
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