Life on the Refrigerator Door

by Alice Kuipers

[Leah]

Claire and her mum don’t have the best of relationships and the only way in which they actually appear to communicate with each other is via the medium of the refrigerator door in the form of notes. The fact is Claire is far too busy being a teenager – out with friends, having a boyfriend and generally just having a life – whereas her mother is far too busy working to provide for herself and her daughter. Which means that their only method of communication is indeed on their refrigerator door. But one day, one note is going to turn Claire and her mums world completely upside down…

These days most of my book recommendations come from Amazon and Life on the Refrigerator Door is no exception. I’ve got no idea what I was looking at at the time but Life on the Refrigerator Door popped up as I was scrolling through books Amazon recommend and I fell in love with the hot pink cover. I also thought it sounded like a fab read partcularly since the last book I read to be written in a similar style was Cecelia Ahern’s book Where Rainbows End which I really enjoyed. I then helped a friend with her site and I picked this with the money I got figuring that the worst that could happen that I wouldn’t like it.

I must admit that I do feel a little cheated by the book. It’s 226 pages long but it’s absolutely not 226 pages full of writing. Because the book is told in notes there’s only one note per page and some of the notes are only a few lines long so I managed to finish the book in under an hour. It is a unique way of trying to tell a story but to be honest, after finishing it, I’m still not totally convinced it worked. I mean the quotes from the magazines say it’s “heartbreaking” and “guaranteed to make me cry” but I never felt either of those emotions whilst reading the book.

The idea of a mother and daughter being so far apart that they only communicate via notes is actually pretty sad. What mother or daughter cannot find the time to talk to each other for at least an hour a day? And, to be honest, the notes don’t even really have a ring of truth to them. They seem forced – despite the fact Claire doodles all over her drawings which is obviously an attempt from the author to get us to be able to know Claire a bit better and to make her more real to us. But for me it didn’t really work. I mean I’ve seen all the reviews everywhere saying the book is fab but I just didn’t get what was supposed to be so good about the book apart from the fact I managed to read it in an hour.

I have to say that even the life-changing note wasn’t really enough to make the book as good as I’d have liked. It again seemed rather forced and it was as if it was thrown in there to make the book more dramatic than it actually was. Also the lack of talking between Claire and her mum about the life-changing thing was shocking. They barely mentioned it and when it did come up, they avoided the subject like the plague. It really just seemed so unreal and there was no depth to the plot or to the characters. It could have been so much better had the author decided to put in some actual pages of words along with the notes rather than just a book full of notes. Unique it may have been but enjoyable it certainly wasn’t.