Dread. It fills your entire as THAT word violently hits your synapses with its devastating connotations. Cancer. We’ve all heard the word in many contexts. We’ve all experienced it in many forms. It challenges us, but it’s our choice to pick the battlefield.
‘The Cancer Ladies’ Running Club’ by Josie Lloyd feels personal and intimate. And painfully relatable. We all know someone with cancer. Many of us battled it – me included. And each and everyone of us has a different relationship with it, and that’s precisely what this book is about.
The emotional story of Keira and her posse of runners lumped together through the painful, shared experience of battling cancer is an honest read. It provides both, laugh out loud moments as well as a heart-wrenching account of the devastation the disease leaves in its wake. Lloyd makes cancer a clear life-defying moment, which it well bloody should be. Life BC and AC is a real thing, and millions experience it daily.
‘The Cancer Ladies’ Running Club’ is an easy read. In the nicest, the most encouraging way – it’s a wonderfully light take on a subject that fills us all with dread. It’s nowhere near as gloomy and verbose as ‘Cancer Ward’ by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and that’s what makes work. Jodie Lloyd’s novel is firmly planted in reality and it kept me asking myself over and over again, what would I do if I was put in this situation again? While cancer changes our world, life doesn’t stop and people around us need to be cared for, bills have to be paid, children must be fed… The story, as heartwarming and uplifting as it is, tries to take on those extremely serious topics surrounding cancer. The most important one of them is how strong is the human power of survival.
I loved the story. The plotting, the reality of living with cancer, the strength radiating from our main group of protagonists. But the development of supporting characters was the novel’s weakest point. Especially Keira’s business partner and her husband; there was an element of cartoonish naivety to them as they were painted into those exaggerated pantomime villains. Apart from that, it is a wonderful and poignant read.
‘The Cancer Ladies’ Running Club’ by Josie Lloyd feels personal and intimate. And painfully relatable. We all know someone with cancer. Many of us battled it – me included. And each and everyone of us has a different relationship with it, and that’s precisely what this book is about.
The emotional story of Keira and her posse of runners lumped together through the painful, shared experience of battling cancer is an honest read. It provides both, laugh out loud moments as well as a heart-wrenching account of the devastation the disease leaves in its wake. Lloyd makes cancer a clear life-defying moment, which it well bloody should be. Life BC and AC is a real thing, and millions experience it daily.
‘The Cancer Ladies’ Running Club’ is an easy read. In the nicest, the most encouraging way – it’s a wonderfully light take on a subject that fills us all with dread. It’s nowhere near as gloomy and verbose as ‘Cancer Ward’ by Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and that’s what makes work. Jodie Lloyd’s novel is firmly planted in reality and it kept me asking myself over and over again, what would I do if I was put in this situation again? While cancer changes our world, life doesn’t stop and people around us need to be cared for, bills have to be paid, children must be fed… The story, as heartwarming and uplifting as it is, tries to take on those extremely serious topics surrounding cancer. The most important one of them is how strong is the human power of survival.
I loved the story. The plotting, the reality of living with cancer, the strength radiating from our main group of protagonists. But the development of supporting characters was the novel’s weakest point. Especially Keira’s business partner and her husband; there was an element of cartoonish naivety to them as they were painted into those exaggerated pantomime villains. Apart from that, it is a wonderful and poignant read.