Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I adored Daisy Jones & The Six so I was - and still am - looking forward to reading other books by Taylor Jenkins Reid. But her debut novel, Forever, Interrupted, really didn't hit the right notes for me. It's fascinating though to see how writers develop over time, so that's really what I'll take out of the book.

The premise is interesting enough: Elsie meets Ben, they elope and he dies suddenly, leaving her to pick up the pieces with a mother in law who has had no idea she even exists (these aren't spoilers - it's all in the description). So the book is about dealing with grief and the different ways in which people manage. But that's honestly as interesting as it gets. The ways in which that theme is explored aren't generally as successful as they are in the hands of more experienced writers (including TJR herself, no doubt) - they tend to the superficial.

It doesn't help that I tend to roll my eyes at insta-love story lines - not that I don't believe in pretty much instant love, as I know it can happen (my parents are a great example!) but it's an overdone trope. My main problem though is Elsie herself - she is supposedly a nice person but her behaviour (both before and after Ben dies) is often just plain juvenile, and it takes her an awful lot of time and histrionics to grow the heck up. My tolerance for histrionics is not high... Also, for a librarian, she is surprisingly uninformed about language and about books so she just doesn't seem to ring true. Ben is a bit of a pain in the proverbial - he swings from classically romantic (so much so that it feels put on) to a bit of a whiner. So I didn't really invest as much as the author no doubt intended in their love story. Without that investment, the novel really falls flat.

The best character in the whole book is a relatively minor character: an elderly library patron called Mr Callaghan, who is refreshing, wickedly humorous, and lightly drawn but all the more deep for that. He's quite delightful. In him, I really saw the seeds for TJR's later writing.