Putting Alice Back Together

by Carol Marinelli

[Leah]

Putting Alice Back Together is billed as a novel Jane Fallon fans will love. As I quite like myself a Jane Fallon novel, I was of course intrigued. However, Putting Alice Back Together is nothing like a Jane Fallon novel. Jane Fallon’s novels, to put it bluntly, make sense. Putting Alice Back Together doesn’t make sense. It is one of the most confusing, convoluted books I’ve read in ages. It’s one long rambling mess that goes backwards and forwards from young Alice to modern-day Alice with nothing to discern which Alice we’re meant to be reading about. You know how books that flash forward and backwards and sideways have a handy little sentence at the beginning of the chapters to tell you who you’re reading about? Yeah, Alice doesn’t have that. So instead you have to try and keep both strands of the plot going whilst also remembering which Alice you’re reading about. Yes, they’re essentially the same Alice, but it’s two different stories about Alice with no markers to tell you which one you’re reading about and, boy, does it get mighty confusing. (About as confusing as this paragraph is!)

Alice is also billed as the – ahem – friend you wish you had. Really? I couldn’t be farther from wishing Alice was my friend. Alice has issues, and maybe she has some ground for her issues that are revealed in bits and pieces, but Alice is just not a nice person, period. She spends a large part of the beginning of the novel slagging off someone who is meant to be her best friend, Roz. She’s rude about her. She’s borderline offensive about how Roz acts, dresses, is. Roz does nothing wrong to Alice. Nothing. Yet Alice acts so meanly towards her behind her back. It was cringe-worthy to read, and I just wanted to slap this person who thought she was so much better than everyone else. How dare Alice say she would be embarrassed to go out with Roz? Who does she think she is? The book just doesn’t have anything to make me want to recommend it. I can’t say it has a great plot, I certainly can’t say it has great characters, and it was just one big mess. Alice was a mess, and the book was a mess. Maybe that was Marinelli’s aim, to make the book as messy as Alice is. But I just didn’t get it. I found it confusing, hard to follow.

Alice just didn’t work for me. The plot, characters, writing, the flip-floppy nature of the plot with it going backwards and forwards every chapter or every other chapter made my mind boggle. I couldn’t keep up with all of these different – yet the same – Alice’s. It was almost schizophrenic. The book just wasn’t to my taste. Maybe some people will “get” Alice and her crazy ways. I didn’t and the book was, quite honestly, a waste of my time because I won’t remember it and I could barely keep up whilst reading it anyway. It’s a shame, it’s always nice to try a new author but sometimes it just doesn’t click and I didn’t want to put Alice back together, I didn’t care for her, didn’t care how her life panned out, didn’t care if she could be put back together. Some folks may like it, but I wasn’t one of them.