Drat, drat, drat. As if the to-be-read pile wasn’t already threatening to engulf most of the known universe (sorry about the hyperbole, been reading Bill Bryson) I just had to follow the link from Aliya Whiteley’s interview on the Macmillan New Writers’ blog to the first three chapters of her new book Light Reading. I had already had a quick look at it last week when we were in Cambridge with Faye and thought it looked very much like my cup of tea but I hadn’t sunk three chapters deep into it.
I wanted to read it before. Now, I want to read it now, today, preferably this minute and to hell with all the problems with my own work in progress.
The characters have snared me and I wonder if the short-story writing which Aliya does and which I have been moaning about here (not hers, my own inability to do same) helps in the almost instant creation of character. We’re barely a dozen pages in to the book and already I feel like I know Lena and Pru. Little details quickly add up to a feeling of depth and these RAF wives are already real to me.
Add to that the definite flavour of the ‘dark side’ which has already developed (I’m not sure how without going back and analysing the text, but it’s there) and I’m hooked. The kind of Royston Vasey undertone which Allcombe had already acquired in Aliya’s first book Three Things About Me is clearly going to be a bigger feature in Light Reading (which has got to be an ironic title).
Anyway, I shall be off to Wottakars later in the day after I have tortured the w-i-p until it confesses and shall curse them roundly if they haven’t already got a copy of Light Reading.
If you don’t regularly read the MNW writers’ blog, do go over and have a look here at Aliya’s interview which will take you on a link to the book.
Thank goodness I’ve almost finished (without pulling too many rib-muscles) The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, because – unlike lots of bloggers – I’m not good at having more than one book on the go at once. Random Acts of Heroic Love will just have to wait…
