The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Conflicting read
“And I knew at last what I had wanted to know since I had met her: that there was no such thing as simple as the storyteller’s love in her, that love was a tangled measure of a thousand different things, and that sometimes there was a word called love that she knew and understood, and then sometimes it was gone, and she could not master it, and being unmastered, she longed to let it go, and then thinking of it, it came again.”
Another beautifully written but structurally chaotic novel from Claire North. I had moments that I loved but ultimately feel frustrated by how events played out. Of the books I have read so far, 15 Lives of Harry August was the best structured; the others (including William Abbey) have circled repetitively through the plot and had unfocused antagonists who never quite materialised any teeth.
It is well worth a read if you are a fan of contemporary spec fic with a literary edge, esp on the British scene, but maybe has more appeal to North fans than new readers.
sunyi dean 