Journal Entry 1 by Breeze144 from Ajax, Ontario Canada on Saturday, February 23, 2008

My favourite book of 2007! This was meant to be sent to cats-eye for the Best of 2007 swap on bookobsessed, but it got buried under some other books here and clearly forgotten! Will send it off now! 

Journal Entry 2 by cats-eye from Bishop Auckland, County Durham United Kingdom on Friday, June 06, 2008

ooops! I thought I'd journalled this awhile back, but forgot to I guess! Sorry!

I have mixed feelings about this one, to be truthful. It has been on my wishlist for ages, so I was very happy to get a chance to read it, but couldn't really connect with the characters. I thought the writing style and concepts were brilliant - Greer's writing is poetic and beautifully evocative, but I just couldn't care about Max or Alice. I found both to be incredibly selfish in their actions, and manipulative beyond belief. For Max to love Alice as much as he went on about, but to lie and manipulate throughout all their encounters...I just found it very shallow and callous. Alice on the other hand never really seemed to care either way about Max - she always appeared to have ulterior motives. I did enjoy Hughie - he seemed the most "real" to me, and I found I sympathised with him the most... but by the end of the story I just hated Max and Alice!
I did also figure out very quickly who the family was that Max was staying with at the beginning of the story, so possibly that ruined a bit of the magic for me, too...or maybe Greer assumed readers would reach the same conclusions as I did?! Anyway, thank you very much Breeze for offering this one in the swap - I would be interested in reading more by this author as I did enjoy his style and use of descriptive language.
I will pass this on asap :)