Jumbled events shuffled in random order!

This is a pretty mundane story spanning 3 generations, telling in minute detail of the everyday lives, loves and losses of Dot and her friend Mavis, their mothers Alice and Sandra, and the men who impregnate and then desert them.

It mainly seems to be an exploration of the emotional effects of everyday betrayal, mistakes and lack of love on the juman psyche. And how those effects can span generations. How mental illness can result from all kinds of life events, from miscarriage to marriage breakup.

As if ashamed to be associated with this very prosaic story, the gorgeously descriptive similes in Ataminta's other book "Everything and Nothing" are absent. (That brilliantly written, insightful book was the reason I sought out this one. Mistake.) The plot is also a tad confusing. I hate the literary contrivance that so many authors are using these days, of popping backwards and forwards in time. It makes for a very confusing read, as you never know who you're hearing about and where they are in the timeline of the story. This story would have been so much more enjoyable and easy to listen to if only Araminta had started at the beginning, when Clarice was young, gone through the life of her daughter Alice, then hwr granddaughter Dot and so on, in chronological order. To add to the confusion, the supporting characters (mainly the men in these women's lives) also have separate chapters with their own viewpoints - which is very interesting, except that get are randomly sprinkled around the book in no particular order!

Honestly, the whole book reads as if a high wind had blown the loose leaf manuscript around the streets and Araminta had had to do a mad dash to gather up all the pages in a jumble before rushing them to the publisher!!

I had to rewind and start again at chapter 6, because I could have sworn Dot lived in a big weird quirky old house, and had a friend called Mavis, but suddenly in chapter 3, it's a girl called Alice who lives in the big old house, gets pregnant the day she loses her virginity and moves her boyfriend into the big house. Then by chapter 4, where has Alice gone? She has suddenly disappeared. Who is talking now? Dot is back in the big old house, aged 14, and hanging out with Mavis again. Then I suddenly realised that we have gone back into the past and are talking about Dot's MOTHER Alice and how she conceived Dot and became so weird and ephemeral. And then we go back to the present with Dot again. And it's Clarice talking about her daughter Alice to her granddaughter Dot. She's taking about someone called Howie who died. But isn't Dot's father called Tony? Oh hang on, is Howie her granddad? These bits could have used an introductory sentence or two at the beginning of each chapter to make it clear who is talking and that we are now going back in time and then forward again. And then in chapter 5 we are back with the young Alice again. So now I gather we are going to be alternating back and forth.
Back to chapter 6 and Mavis appears to be pregnant? How did that happen? We don't find out until chapter 11. Then still later on we get the viewpoint of the man.

OMG Araminta!!! There's no need to make your poor reader work this hard to figure out what's going on!!! Or maybe the reason you're using this device is because nothing much actually happens in the story, other than several generations of women gets impregnated then deserted, with resulting mental illnesses. Until Dot nearly gets killed off in chapter 20. So is this the only way of making the story interesting enough to read?

The narrator however is mostly excellent, although her men's voices are not any different from her female voices, so you often can't tell who is speaking. This would have been very useful if she were to have given each character a very separate distinctly different voice, which would help the reader figure out who's talking in any given chapter - since there are so many random time related confusions. However, she does do very good accents. There's a Manchester accent and at lots of good Welsh accents. And she paces the story nicely, making it pleasant to listen to - once I'd rewound a few times in order to figure out where I was in the plot!!)

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