Liz Burski

And Addie is not keen on the idea at all.

And the first 56 pages of the novel actually get them there.

But basically, I just found it very hard to get to where the story was supposed to be going.

I found it bewildering and difficult.

You know, I just found, and I know this is a very negative thing to say, but I just found all the characters so dull and so unpleasant.

It was really hard for me to identify with any of them.

And Ben is detached and self-centred and trying to do the right thing but being irritating with it.

The only character that I felt I slightly warmed to was Morris.

That's Adi's father.

They're a Jewish family.

and he's in the rag trade, and he's also got his own little business, not entirely legal, going on on the side.

But there seemed to be more of an emotional warmth in him than in any of the other characters.

The child, Jake, who's 10 in the story, he is Rick Joukowsky's younger self, and

Well, he's written a version of his life according to what Rick Joukowsky has said about the book is that he tried to write about this time of his life as a child in the McCarthy era.

He tried to do it as memoir and he couldn't make it work.

So he decided to write a novel.

And in my opinion, that's what's gone wrong with it.

It reads to me like an early draft rather than a novel that's been refined and worked on over a period of time.

And I couldn't help, I kept looking back at Rick Joukowsky's timing.

It seems to have come out very, very quickly after Dark, which is actually a terrific book, I think.