Laura's Handmade Life

by Amanda Addison

[Leah]

I just couldn't finish it. It is one of the worst books I've ever attempted to read. I'm even going to review it properly, but here's some of the reasons I gave up after 100 pages (Please be aware my review may seem harsh, but God, reading should not be that much of a struggle and as I type this I'm so angry with how bad it was!):

- The novel jumps from scene-to-scene. For example, Laura starts painting her kitchen (randomly, as you do) and falls off a ladder and bangs her head. The next thing we know, she's in the ambulance. There's no middle-scene there to segue the two together. This is how it goes:

Just paint that last piece, I foolishly tell myself just before something hard and metallic digs into my forehead. The kitchen spins round and round and I know I should jump down. Then I am on the floor. I stand up, feeling fine. I can't feel any bumps. I wipe my face and when I look it is covered in blood. The blood keeps coming and coming.

From the ambulance window, I can see Adi and the girls dragging the sledge up the road.

There should be something else there, in the middle, to mold the two scenes together. Or at least I think there should be. Because Laura's in the house by herself, so surely she needs to ring the ambulance, surely we need to be told she's ringing the ambulance?!

Here's another example as Laura calls about a dog:

"I'm standing in the middle of the road, with half my attention of the passing cars.
'Great, you've still got it, wonderful,' I say thinking there's something very familiar about the voice on the other end of the line."

No hello, no asking about the dog, just 'Great, you've still got it, wonderful'. It's very disjointed, and the story just isn't allowed to flow.

- Laura is one of the worst female characters I have ever come across. I only read 100 pages, but I was just so sick and tired of her whinging about wanting her old life in Ealing back. She kept wishing she didn't have her kids, that she could go to the 1950s as everything was 'simpler'. She even complains about there being no milk in the staff room at the college where she teachers, when surely she could bring some herself!

- She hates pets, dogs in particular because of their 'doggy' smell that owners refuse to acknowledge then a page later she gets a dog.

- On page 93 she writes "Retro fashion" on the whiteboard of the textile class she teachers then two pages later, she writes it again. Doh.

- There are too many exclamation-pointed remarks. It makes Laura seem like an excitable school child!!!!!!!

I am a very critical reader, my internal editor is continually finding mistakes, sentences that sound wrong, errors like the retro fashion thing, and I just couldn't bring myself to finish Laura's Handmade Life. She's a textiles teacher and makes designs but can't sew!!!!!

I just found the first 100 pages to be boring and irritating. The first few chapters of the book are meant to hook you in, but I just wanted to throw this over the baranca outside our house. I didn't care about Laura or about her life (her terrible, terrible life in the country!!!!!).

Yup, I'm kind of sad I hated it. I couldn't even finish it and that rarely happens. I apologise if my review seems harsh but I truly have no idea how this book got published because I thought it was awful. I get offended when I read books like this because it's just terrible.

I hope the book does well, truly I do, but this was just not the book for me in any way, shape or form.

PS: All my exclamation points are a joke! Honestly!