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A review by david_r_grigg
Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson
4.0
This was (I think) the only remaining Atkinson novel I hadn’t read other than her most recent. It was one of the first ebooks I read on my new Kobo ereader, and unfortunately it wasn’t a good choice as there are a lot of typographical shifts which probably work well in a printed book, but not at all well in an ebook.
The ‘Weird’ in the title is apposite, because this is a strange book, hard to summarise. It’s billed as a ‘comic novel’ and indeed there are some funny bits in it. But it’s also frequently confusing.
It is mostly told from the point of view of Effie, a young woman now living with her mother on a remote island off the Scottish coast, but telling the story of her time at the University of Dundee in the early 1970s. Much of it reminds me of my own time at university at about that time, or dropping out of it as I did, and of the slightly hippy crowd of people I knew and knocked about with.
I think I’d like to re-read it in printed form without the annoying peculiarities of font styles and sizes in the ebook.
The ‘Weird’ in the title is apposite, because this is a strange book, hard to summarise. It’s billed as a ‘comic novel’ and indeed there are some funny bits in it. But it’s also frequently confusing.
It is mostly told from the point of view of Effie, a young woman now living with her mother on a remote island off the Scottish coast, but telling the story of her time at the University of Dundee in the early 1970s. Much of it reminds me of my own time at university at about that time, or dropping out of it as I did, and of the slightly hippy crowd of people I knew and knocked about with.
I think I’d like to re-read it in printed form without the annoying peculiarities of font styles and sizes in the ebook.