Excruciatingly drawn out – too much for light chick-lit
Pillow Talk by Freya North
My review on Amazon | Book on Amazon
2 out of 5 stars
Reviewed Apr 28, 2008
The plot is fairly common: boy and girl meet in a school rock concert and fall in love, and somehow, don’t stay in touch. Then by chance, meet again 17 years later in a remote town in Yorkshire, immediately recognize each other, find that they feel the same intensity of love as before. The book dips in and out of the school years (17 years ago) to the present. So far so good. But after this the plot thickens and becomes of a mud-like consistency… there are a series of searching for each other travelling up and down between London and Yorkshire, and an out-of-character fling the hero has with a catty co-worker, the ensuing jealousy and accusations of “you lied to me!”, the heroine’s sleep-walking incidents and related amateur psychology, her bad relationship with her divorced parents, and her relationship with a wise old lady who shaped her youth. Of course all ends well and the hero and heroine get together in the end as expected. Excruciatingly drawn out to 430-odd pages – perhaps could have been written in 250 pages or so, cutting out all the irrelevant details.
This book being in the genre of “light and easy” chick lit, is trying to do too much outside of its scope. The author tries to impart tangential and inconsequential knowledge on music and appreciation of music through the hero, and of jewellery making and rare gem stones through the heroine. The history of a rare gem stone called tanzanite is repeated in multiple places in the book. The heroine is even named Petra (Greek for “stone”) Flint (stone again!). The style is not the easy flowing style I have come to expect of this kind of book – the sentences and analogies too contrived for my liking.
The book has a lot of foul language, spoken out of character by practically all the characters, seemingly for effect and adds nothing to the story. The description of the customary intimate passages is also too awkward and doesn’t read well.
Coming to the “mushy-ness” of the book – you would expect romance novels to be mushy, but there seems to be no boundary between the way the male character and female character express their feelings. Bottom line is bad characterization.
Recommend you pick it up from a library and read if you’re curious, not worth spending money buying it or keeping in your collection!
