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A review by secre
His Kidnapper's Shoes by Maggie James
3.0
This is certainly a novel with promise, but it doesn’t quite deliver on it. It’s well written but relies heavily on a series of increasingly unbelievable co-incidences for the narrative thread to unspool. Because of the high reliance on coincidental meetings, you can more or less guess what happens next by what would move the story along easily meaning it is predicable. There was only one coincidence that wasn’t, and yet that was perhaps the most unbelievable one of all.
I also thought the author missed a trick with her points of view. Being told from the perspective of Laura Bateman, past and present and her son Daniel in the present, it seemed rather two dimensional. There was never any tension and until the last quarter of the book I had no understanding of the other family except through the skewed gaze of Laura. I think it would have worked better with Laura and Daniel in the present and either the original mother or the babysitter in the past... or not tell the past first person at all.
The sexual crudity put me off as well; I understand that Daniel uses sex as a coping mechanism but it’s pushed on you from so many angles it gets tiresome. Sometimes it’s because he wants a hard screw, other times because he’s actually getting attached to someone... but in the most irrelevant of places you suddenly get a sexual reference and it’s unnecessary. I’d got the point by the third or forth reference. I did not need the next three hundred.
And finally, the characters seemed a little too perfect, a little two dimensional in their make up. They all - with no exceptions - had tragic life stories, but they seemed to interact very coldly with the world. They didn’t have the harsh edges that real people have and therefore they never quite seemed well... real.
That said, I did enjoy the book, but it is certainly nothing to rave about.
I also thought the author missed a trick with her points of view. Being told from the perspective of Laura Bateman, past and present and her son Daniel in the present, it seemed rather two dimensional. There was never any tension and until the last quarter of the book I had no understanding of the other family except through the skewed gaze of Laura. I think it would have worked better with Laura and Daniel in the present and either the original mother or the babysitter in the past... or not tell the past first person at all.
The sexual crudity put me off as well; I understand that Daniel uses sex as a coping mechanism but it’s pushed on you from so many angles it gets tiresome. Sometimes it’s because he wants a hard screw, other times because he’s actually getting attached to someone... but in the most irrelevant of places you suddenly get a sexual reference and it’s unnecessary. I’d got the point by the third or forth reference. I did not need the next three hundred.
And finally, the characters seemed a little too perfect, a little two dimensional in their make up. They all - with no exceptions - had tragic life stories, but they seemed to interact very coldly with the world. They didn’t have the harsh edges that real people have and therefore they never quite seemed well... real.
That said, I did enjoy the book, but it is certainly nothing to rave about.