Jack guest blogs the Monday book this week

I loved this novel and read it right through in one day. Now that is unusual for me, because I tend towards non-fiction and the few novels I do read are usually whodunnits. An exception to that would be Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No. 1 Ladies Detective and the Scotland Street series. That may be a clue to why I enjoyed this so much. Semple has the same great way of capturing a sense of place. For McCall Smith it’s Botswana and middle-class Edinburgh and for Semple it’s Seattle and Antarctica!

The first half of the book seems like a disconnected series of e-mails, school reports and anonymous commentary and I was just beginning to question where it was all leading when – whoosh – it all converged and began making a different kind of sense.

I loved the way Semple nails her characters while also teasing the reader with a whole host of really bizarre settings – Microsoft, the crazy house in Seattle, Antarctica and high powered architecture.

I certainly don’t want to spoil the story for anyone, but I was completely hooked and couldn’t put this book down. Wendy suggested that it was a ‘young adult’ book, and I suppose it might be but that shouldn’t put anyone off reading it.