Smashbomb

Search

Search results

All (759)

Content

Rent: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

Jonathan Larson

7.3 (3 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Set on the Lower East Side of New York City, Rent is the story of young bohemians Mark, Roger,...

Lyndsey Gollogly (2893 KP) rated The More you Ignore me in Books

Feb 20, 2022

31 of 230
Book
The more you ignore me
By Jo Brand
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Celebrity obsession, coming of age and cow shit - an hilarious, poignant and darkly comic novel by the Queen of Comedy.

Alice is a young girl growing up in a dysfunctional family in Herefordshire in the 1980s. Her mother is suffering a mental illness - she is on medication, is put away in an institution, but constantly escapes - while her father, Keith, very sweetly, tries to keep everything together. His in-laws, the Wildgooses, are a bunch of reckless, lawless country bumpkins and can offer very little help or sensible advice, preferring instead to remain in the pub or to use a shotgun to solve life's little problems. The only thing that gives meaning and hope to Alice as she makes her way through childhood, school and teenage trauma is her obsession with the singer Morrissey of The Smiths. She is desperate to see The Smiths at a live gig, but somehow her family always manages to derail her plans. Gradually her mother begins to share her fascination with the rock god and his presence in their lives goes someway to healing her and repairing her relationship with her long-suffering daughter.

This was really good! It was funny and darkly so. It follows the life of a young girl dealing with the effects her mothers mental illness has on her and her father. It’s has a dark underlay that as someone who struggles mentally I can relate too. So much better than I was expecting.

Kudos

Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated The Nix in Books

Dec 4, 2017

The Nix

Nathan Hill | 2017 | Fiction & Poetry

9.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

Glorious, extravagant, epic family saga

It's hardly surprising Meryl Streep has bought the rights to this debut novel by Nathan Hill, which explores relations amongst several generations of a family.

It spans nearly fifty years, with flashbacks to student protests during 1968, from the present day, and the travails of an academic, struggling to engage with lazy and disaffected students, and playing ‘Elfscape’, an online role-playing game that works along the lines of World of Warcraft. The narrative perspective moves around quite a bit in the first few chapters, but a strong theme quickly emerges.

Samuel Andresen-Anderson is the principal protagonist, and is a genuinely empathetic character. Far from perfect, he is beset with irritations, ranging from the cheating and ignorance of many of his students to the family upheaval suffered during his childhood, which still troubles him more than twenty years later.

Behind all this is the story of Faye, Samuel’s mother, who walked out on her family more than twenty years earlier, and who is catapulted into the public consciousness following a sudden impulsive act. This offered Hill the opportunity for some acute observations about the motives and actions of the student rebels from the late 1960s, while also exposing the hypocrisies of the establishment and the cruelties of some of the police during those troubles. In between, the author even delves into Norwegian folklore.

The writing is fine – clear and accessible - and Hill manages the complex storylines admirably. Moving backwards and forwards between the late 1960s, late 1980s and 2011, the plot never flags. This was a long novel, but very entertaining throughout.