Advice for Strays - Justine Kilkerr

This months bookclub was a little light on members due to all the bank holidays before and after it. Nicola brought along the refreshments this month, so we all had larger cake slices than usual to make up for everyone else.

This book seems to have stumped a large amount of the book club, almost half the people at the meeting had not managed to read through to the end. Some also said they might not finish it after hearing what was discussed in the meeting.

We all felt that the book was very well written, it read very easily even though the topic itself was very confusing. Many people in the club felt that although they weren't gripped enough to want to pick the book up as often as they felt they should, once they had picked it up they got drawn back in very quickly. Some people found the little chapters to be a hinderance to their getting drawn into the book, others felt that this gave some good natural breaks to the narration.

The reason why so many people weren't gripped by the book was because it didn't have much of a plot, but then that's not what this book is about. It was felt that the book didn't go anywhere much, things just seemed to happen without much obvious direction. The ending we found to be good, but it wasn't much of a resolution, but then again this is more realistic than many neat endings in other books.

The main source for discussion came from the lion Jericho, and whether he was real or not. There seems to be a lot of evidence in the book to say that he was very real at certain points. But then again how can a lion be really living in a suburban street and talking to a person? We had a short discussion on what we each do to give ourselves more confidence, in the same way that Marnie uses Jericho. This gave us some insight into the reasons why someone would invent an imaginary friend later in life. Eventually we all agreed that Jericho is a very subjective character in the book, everyone seemed to interpret him very differently.

Overall we gave the book a 4 out of 10 with marks ranging from 0 to 7.