Simplicity and complication

Vivien's Heavenly Ice Cream Shop by Abby Clements

Frog’s niece lent me this when she came to stay. It took me a while to get into it but by about page 40 I was hooked. It’s about two twenty-something sisters who take over their grandmother’s icecream shop on a Brighton beach. There’s some romance and some family drama – and even some icecream recipes. I suppose it would fall into the chick-lit genre but without chick-lit’s usual frenetic jokiness and it’s written in such a simple way that it’s a pleasure to read.

    I checked the book on Amazon (because I wanted to find out what else the author has written*) and browsed the reviews. While most of the reviewers loved the book, one or two derided it for its simplicity. As a novel-writer myself, I know how difficult simplicity is to achieve and I think the style of this book is the result of skill not the opposite. A writer to watch.

Virals by Kathy Reichs

I’d never read Kathy Reichs before but I found one of her books on the library’s bestseller shelves and decided to give her a try. It turned out to be the third in a ‘young adult’ series, of which this is the first. Never mind, I loved it (I think I’m going simple in the head.) so I grabbed this when I saw it on the shelves.

    I love the adventurous heroine – fourteen-year-old Tory Brennan, and the setting – an island off Charleston in South Carolina. The plots are gripping, with a dash of sci-fi, and the style is punchy.

    The series improves as it goes on, perhaps with the greater involvement of Reichs’s son Brendan, who is mentioned in the acknowledgements of this book but actually credited as co-author on the book I read first (Code). It may also be his involvement that makes the teenagers and their world so believable. These are books written from the teenage point of view, not books by an adult looking down.

Deadly Decisions by Kathy Reichs

So I decided to give Kathy Reichs’s adult books a try - they're crime novels featuring a female forensic anthropologist. What a disappointment. There were glimpses of the punchy style (blue sky ‘elbowed’ back the clouds, thoughts ‘swirling like five o’clock traffic’) but way too much information for my taste. Take this, for example.

Craig Beacham worked for the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, NCAVC, one of the major components of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, CIRG. For a time the entity had been called the Child Abduction and Serial Killer Unit, CASKU, but had recently reverted to the original name. Since the training of evidence recovery technicians, or ERT’s, is one of the functions of NCAVC, it is this unit that organizes the annual course.

I gave up.

    I am however giving the author another chance and trying another (more recent) book in the adult series, and so far it’s better.



* Two novels. The one above is her first. The second is called Meet Me under the Mistletoe.