Sophie Pattison loves books. And as well as a dream job at a local book festival, she has a husband she adores; a lifelong best friend, Emma; and a brother she’s always been close to. Which makes you wonder why since Christmas Sophie has been living alone, estranged from Emma, avoiding her brother, and about to be fired. Now it feels like the only thing she has left is reading. When Sophie rediscovers an author she first read in her twenties, the words on the page reach her in a new way—becoming both solace and company. Sophie devours every one of the author's novels and begins to dream of meeting her, but knows they never will. But what if they did? What if, by then, the author feels like a friend? What if, for Sophie, it feels almost like love?
The great pleasure of this novel, aside from its depiction of Sophie coming into her own, is its celebration of reading and writers.Jane Austen, the Brontës, Katherine Mansfield, Daphne du Maurier, Hilary Mantel, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout all get a mention.
Mason’s prose is wan and witty, handling the admixture of pathos and bathos well; and her sinuous sentences capture the wavering movements of thought with less fuss and more laughs than, say, Virginia Woolf ... Mason is brilliant, too, at describing the small but intense joys of everyday life ... If there’s a fault to be identified in this continuously witty and touching narrative, it’s in the person of Lilac .... She’s more deus ex machina in Sophie’s story than fully realised character ... But perhaps that’s by design. In this Bridget-Jones-meets-Pirandello caper, Mason is nothing if not knowing.
The narrative runs almost entirely on the fumes of over-weighted trivialities ... Sophie is a wet cardigan of a protagonist ... A novel of unprecedented banality.
