This is a story about nothing and yet about everything. It takes place over the course of the year in the Victoria Park neighbourhood of London. We start with Wolfie and his wife Mona whose dementia is getting worse. Each month/chapter we get a peek into the life of someone else in Victoria Park. It's the type of neighbourhood where everyone has lived there for years so they are all connected in some way. Someone mentioned in one month as a side character, we will get to see them as the lead in the next month.
It's quite a real and raw story. As I said, there's no real plot, but this is simply real life, really. No one is behaving as an idealised fictional character. The author hasn't tidied up people's lives. She's not trying to get you to take sides. It just feels like real lives on paper. People dealing with loss, drugs, infidelity, illness, love and more.
I can't say that you get loads of resolution to any of these plot lines though. A few of them tie up really sneakily in later chapters. A main character from an earlier month will make a passing comment in a later chapter and you'll be like Oh! got our answer now! But I don't think the point is for us to have resolution as it's not really a story with a plot. There are a LOT of characters and I had to flip back to earlier months to see if we had met this person before.
This is kinda a winding review but that pretty much accurately reflects the way the book meandered through the year. Ultimately this was about Wolfie and Mona and her dementia and I think we needed all the filler chapters for that last page to hit as hard as it did.
It's quite a real and raw story. As I said, there's no real plot, but this is simply real life, really. No one is behaving as an idealised fictional character. The author hasn't tidied up people's lives. She's not trying to get you to take sides. It just feels like real lives on paper. People dealing with loss, drugs, infidelity, illness, love and more.
I can't say that you get loads of resolution to any of these plot lines though. A few of them tie up really sneakily in later chapters. A main character from an earlier month will make a passing comment in a later chapter and you'll be like Oh! got our answer now! But I don't think the point is for us to have resolution as it's not really a story with a plot. There are a LOT of characters and I had to flip back to earlier months to see if we had met this person before.
This is kinda a winding review but that pretty much accurately reflects the way the book meandered through the year. Ultimately this was about Wolfie and Mona and her dementia and I think we needed all the filler chapters for that last page to hit as hard as it did.