The Girls - August Book Club

We were a very small group this month what with holidays etc. so only a few of us managed to sample Gaynor's lovely baking. This book provided a very frenetic discussion, especially to do with some of the practicalities of being a craniophagus twin.

We found there was very little description of the twins so it was very hard to imagine how they actually looked. This combined with the feeling that the characters weren't very well written to made us feel very little connection with the characters. We compared this novel with the previous book club book and found the reason we liked the previous one was because of a strong connection we felt towards the Guernsey characters. We all felt indifferent towards the characters in this book.

There were some shocking scenes to do with birth and sex within the book which we felt were only there to try to make the girls more human. These are things that "normal" people go through therefore the author made the girls go through them. We were all shocked by the impossibility of the girls birth, being medically inclined we thought this should have been handled more realistically. The scene between the girls and Frankie Foyle we found to be very strange and a little uncomfortable.

Not everyone managed to finish the novel this time this might be because the novel became very slow during the middle part with no real direction. It was also felt to be a little bit dry, not human enough to keep our attention. We discussed the end of the book and it was suggested that maybe Nick should have written a chapter at the end describing the girls last days just to neaten it all up. We felt Nick was the right person for the job because he had become so close to the girls. We also thought that maybe the girls chapters could have coincided a bit more often so we could see the same thing from different eyes.

Overall the book got 5 out of 10 with no marks higher than 6.