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Title: This was January's choice for my general fiction group...
Review: ...and I was in the distinct minority in disliking it in the extreme. It isn't badly written, so perhaps I should include a disclaimer. I do not ordinarily enjoy fictional books about children who have miserable childhoods, although I have occasionally found stories in that category which rise above the implicit drawback of being voyeur to a child's pervasive unhappiness.This book isn't one of them. It isn't very funny, for something that is supposed to be a "gentle comedy", and there is no one in the story, besides Fleur, who isn't either tranparently loathesome or impliedly perverse. Even the good guys in Fleur's life, like Constantine and her grandmother, are lacking. Constantine had all the earmarks of a pedophile, and her grandmother abandons her, rather than reach some sort of compromise with her own son.What an unpleasant and ultimately disappointing book.
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