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A review by curiouspolymath
When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
4.0
I bought this book when it came out. It came highly recommended and with a lot of splashy reviews. I had a hard time getting into the story, especially with the way the story started. It was very disconcerting.
I picked it up and put it down a number of times in the interim. This year I decided that I must persevere at least up until the half way mark; I am happy that I persevered, for this is a remarkable book, even though it is gloomy and dark.
A professor once said that a good mystery starts with the murder weapon introduced on the first page, and the murder is solved on the last with the weapon prominently featured. While not following the edict exactly, Kate Atkinson does marvelous work entering tidbits of facts, clues and descriptions that makes very little sense initially but as the story gets rolling along, the tidbits begin to fit together in a coherent manner. She has a masterful way of describing and observing the people’s surroundings with their inner voice, their personality. Her eye for detail and words make those scenes, even when it is a head fake, extremely interesting to read.
The characters are well thought out and well developed; you see them as others see them as well as how they see themselves. Not all of them are sympathetic obviously, but the reader does hang their words as the story develops. They are all flawed in their own way, they have all been damaged in their own way, which is what makes for the tapestry of the plot so intriguing and enthralling. Atkinson is the weaver of multiple complex threads to create this tapestry. Even when she telegraphs the plot twist, I didn’t mind much as I was engrossed in the telling.
Without giving away the plot, the story involves the survivor of a long ago senseless crime, a young orphan girl, and a couple of police detectives, one former and one present, their entanglements, past and present. The resolution of the full story was complete without seeming fanciful, except for a couple of the storylines felt rushed at the end, as resolutions are wont to be.
A bonus for me is that part of the story takes place in Scotland, one of my favored locales. While the comparison to the Tartan Noir School could be loosely drawn, I would place this novel on its own because it is so uniquely told.
I am now a Kate Atkinson fan. More books to buy.
I picked it up and put it down a number of times in the interim. This year I decided that I must persevere at least up until the half way mark; I am happy that I persevered, for this is a remarkable book, even though it is gloomy and dark.
A professor once said that a good mystery starts with the murder weapon introduced on the first page, and the murder is solved on the last with the weapon prominently featured. While not following the edict exactly, Kate Atkinson does marvelous work entering tidbits of facts, clues and descriptions that makes very little sense initially but as the story gets rolling along, the tidbits begin to fit together in a coherent manner. She has a masterful way of describing and observing the people’s surroundings with their inner voice, their personality. Her eye for detail and words make those scenes, even when it is a head fake, extremely interesting to read.
The characters are well thought out and well developed; you see them as others see them as well as how they see themselves. Not all of them are sympathetic obviously, but the reader does hang their words as the story develops. They are all flawed in their own way, they have all been damaged in their own way, which is what makes for the tapestry of the plot so intriguing and enthralling. Atkinson is the weaver of multiple complex threads to create this tapestry. Even when she telegraphs the plot twist, I didn’t mind much as I was engrossed in the telling.
Without giving away the plot, the story involves the survivor of a long ago senseless crime, a young orphan girl, and a couple of police detectives, one former and one present, their entanglements, past and present. The resolution of the full story was complete without seeming fanciful, except for a couple of the storylines felt rushed at the end, as resolutions are wont to be.
A bonus for me is that part of the story takes place in Scotland, one of my favored locales. While the comparison to the Tartan Noir School could be loosely drawn, I would place this novel on its own because it is so uniquely told.
I am now a Kate Atkinson fan. More books to buy.