Blackberry Wine and Seventh Heaven

Book reviews by Ingela Richardson

Enjoying a glass of blackberry wine with Joanne Harris or entering Seventh Heaven with Alice Hoffman is experiencing a little practical magic. Everyday things become special and magical in the hands of these writers. But sometimes this kind of approach or style of writing seems to go horribly wrong.

I just re-read "Five quarters of the orange" by Joanne Harris and for the first time read "Diamond Star Halo" by Tiffany Murray. They are both narrated by women remembering girlhood days and raw emotional havoc all around them. But where Harris creates something that is tragic and believable, Murray's world is tragic and unbelievable. Possibly the latter is more factual then, as they always say fact is stranger than fiction? But some books have the bare appearance of reality when others seem to be the writer's over-indulgence, veering into the worlds of cartoon or caricature.

Perhaps sometimes authors are too much in their own created worlds? I find it very frustrating when some writers persist in creating their flawed heroes in their own images. In this way, the little nerdy guy with glasses who was always bullied at school gets to defeat all his tormentors with a terrible vengeance in the pages of his own book, but it is predictable and just not imaginative.

I don't like the world of rock 'n roll, and possibly this is why I didn't like "Diamond Star Halo" at all, feeling the shallowness of eating all icing and no cake.

By complete contrast, "Thirty-Three Teeth" by Colin Cotterill is brilliant. It is the deceptively simple, gripping tale of coroner Dr Siri Paiboun set in Laos.

Perhaps the appeal also lies in the author's own sense of humour. The more subtle, the better. Not Peter Pan's crowing, "Oh the cleverness of me!"