Kilbrack. So, from the cover I’m guessing it’s some kind of ‘romance in a sleepy seaside town’ kind of book. The town being Kilbrack?
You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But no. I’ve yet to work out what relevance the cover has to the story, since it involves neither leap-frogging nor beaches. There is a village called Kilbrack, though.
Oh. So what is it about?
The premise is pretty fun. Our MC is O’Leary Montagu, who woke up in a hospital 11 years ago with amnesia. For 6 of those years he’s been obsessed with a book called Ill Fares The Land, a biography of Nancy Valentine, who grew up in Kilbrack, was mysteriously expelled and returned years later to find the village a ruin. O’Leary is now travelling to the village himself.
Um. Why?
See the part about ‘obsessed’ above. He wants to write a biography of Nancy Valentine, and wants to see the ruin for himself.
So… let me guess. He has some adventures in the journey, and then when he finally gets there it triggers some kind of personal revelation, and there’s probably the Introspection bit and the Backstory bit and probably an Epiphany bit.
No, it’s rather more clever than that. O’Leary gets there to find that the village, while in decline, is no abandoned ruin. All the characters from the biography are still there, still living. And none of them have heard of Nancy Valentine.
Oh, OK. So what happens?
Spoilers. While this book isn’t really constructed as a mystery – some of what’s happened is obvious to the reader long before it’s obvious to O’Leary – it’s still not a story you want revealed in advance. The interest is in discovering how this bizarre state of affairs came about, and when everything comes together it’s pretty satisfying.
A good read, then?
A slow start, but once it got going I enjoyed it a lot. The characters run the spectrum from finely detailed to comic caricature, and they all have their own plotlines that intersect enough for it to make sense that they should all be happening together, but not so much that it seems contrived. The writing is clever without being pretentious. It’s never laugh-out-loud funny, but there were plenty of moments that raised a smile.
Check you out. Not a bad word.
Well, like I said it does take a while to get going, and there’s a couple of moments where things seemed to be a bit too much of a coincidence. They certainly didn’t detract from the experience, though. If you’re after a clever coming of age story with a bit of farce thrown in, this is worth picking up.
If only the guy who designed the cover had read it.
Indeed.
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