Human Croquet

Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is my second Kate Atkinson in about a month - the other was Case Histories. I have only read two of her books but there seem to be similarities between them. In both books there are dysfunctional families, child abuse, incest, a fatal stabbing, an axe as a murder weapon, hidden crimes and unrequieted love.

She certainly knows how to write unusual characters though. I'm not totally 100% sure what happened by the end of the book, not a lot seemed to happen until about 230 pages in, then it all got a bit weird, then it was all explained away in a "Bobby Ewing in the shower" kind of a way. I'm being a bit simplistic there, it was better than Dallas of course!

At times it was a bit confusing when it jumped back into the past and you had to work out which members of the family it was referring to and how they tied into the people in the present. I felt sorry for Eliza who should have had a totally different life to the one she ended up with. There were one or two characters which didn't really need to be there in my opinion, like Mr Rice.

I will read more Kate Atkinson but I'm a bit "literatured out" at the mo so I'm goingfor a nice gruesome medical thriller next - Life Support by Tess Gerritsen!

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