Thursday 11 January 2018

Recent reading

 Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey.  

Viking 2014

I have decided that my new look blog should include notes on things I have read as reading takes up much more of my time than it used to.  They will not be formal book reviews, just notes and comments.

A friend lent me this book before Christmas.  I have now finished reading it, as has my husband who reads much more quickly than I do.  I have to say I think it should come with a health warning for readers over seventy years old as the narrator is an elderly woman with dementia that gets progressively worse as the book goes on.  The story is advertised as a detective story.  It certainly has a mystery at the centre of it, a mystery which the narrator has been trying to solve for seventy years.   The story combines the narrator’s current life and her determination to solve the mystery despite her dementia, with a narrative set just after the second world war which talks about how the mystery occurred.



The author is young and I wondered how she managed to identify with the narrator but I have just seen that she has dedicated the book to both her grandmothers so perhaps she does have experience of the elderly and dementia.  She often addresses modern issues through the eyes of her daughter which gives the book a contemporary feel.  All in all, I would recommend it.  I plan to keep an eye open for other things she has written.

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