Pearl - Siân Hughes
The first word that comes to mind with Pearl is "inconsistent". There were moments when I absolutely loved it, where it too on the tone of a ghost story and the sense of Marianne being haunted by her past was enrapturing. The grief not just for her mother but for an age of innocence she can never return to and that may never have actually existed, symbolised by her childhood home and her inaccurate , inconplete memories of it, is palpable and powerful.
The rest of the time, though, I veered between bored and irritated. This is the second of 2023's Booker longlist books featuring a main character who seems entirely self-interested while lacking even a shred of self awareness - the first being All The Little Bird-Hearts, which I DNFd - and that sort of narrator just doesn't land for me. Large chunks of this books meander along, taking twenty or thirty pages to say nothing at all or revisit things we've already exhaustively experienced, and there were a couple of times when I put it down and almost didn't pick it back up again. The good parts were good enough to keep me reading to the end, but it was touch and go.
It's fine, certainly not bad by any measure, but it's one of the weaker novels on the longlist and it's not one I'll come back to.