Two sisters...two very different lives. Alison. As Christmas approaches, her American dream is in tatters. Her highflying career is on the skids, as she is made jobless in the financial meltdown. Her wealthy boyfriend is playing away. But pride prevents her from telling her family just how bad things are. Olivia, back home, is fraught trying to juggle family, career, preparations for Christmas and a surprise party for their mother's seventieth birthday. How she envies, and sometimes resents, her sister Alison and her life of excitement and affluence in New York. Coming home is the last thing Alison wants to do, especially now that she's met a rather attractive, sexy, down to earth neighbour. But family ties are strong. Alison and Olivia sort their differences, the party throws up a few surprises and Christmas brings changes for Alison that she could never have imagined before...
This review is going to be short and sweet because, basically, I don’t really have anything nice to say about it and as it’s Christmastime and as people don’t want to read thousands of word about why a book isn’t particularly good, I’m going to reel myself in and keep it short. Basically, Coming Home was a bit of a disaster. The only Patricia Scanlan novel I’ve read was Francesca’s Party which was eons ago, but after reading Coming Home I won’t exactly be rushing to read her library of novels. I think this is a book that started as a short story, or at least would have been better as a short story, because otherwise it’s 280 or so pages of… nothing. There’s nothing to it. The title may be about “coming home” but it takes almost a third of the book (if not more) before that even occurs, and the novel just felt… rushed.
It’s all a bit of a mess and there’s just nothing really to it. That’s all I can say. The writing is clunky in places, as if the editor/copy-editor just wasn’t bothered, the amount of Irishisms used was mind-boggling and unnecessary (you’re writing a book, you do not need to make it sound authentic because it just comes across as corny). It just didn’t work for me. It’s as if Scanlan’s publishers were desperate to cash in on the Christmas market and chucked any old thing out. This would have worked better as a little short story because the amount of time Alison spends complaing about her jobless state is enough to put you off, especially when she starts going on about money and how she has none of it (yet she doesn’t sell off her designer clothes and hangbags, so she’s clearly not destitute) but as a full-length novel (or as full-length as something that is 280+ pages can be) it doesn’t work, sadly and it just wasn’t for me.
