David Pengilly

After being heralded as a new talent it is an obvious surprise to find that nothing has happened for Mr Ridker and I can tell you easily why that is. The book is well written, too well by half, but is not entertaining. It is like sitting with that overly studious literary buff on the school bus whilst wishing that you were anywhere else. Pretty quickly you find yourself skipping bits hoping for some juicy action that must surely be about to happen in the coming pages, only it never does. When you are a good writer but you cannot bring yourself to make your book interesting to your readers that is surely something approaching a cardinal sin? They say that first novels are often a bit like this and this is the book that proves the rule. If a novelist was to think twice about certain socially unpalatable character traits then they would have to think more than twice when they put one after another into their first novel. To get through life to this isolated place cannot have been easy and let’s hope that Andrew wins an award so that he can become certain that he needs to change nothing in his next book and guarantees his inexorable decline to oblivion. Possibly a bit heavy but I’m sure that you can get my point!