Reading the Booker Prize - Stone Yard Devotional
When the Booker longlist was first announced, Stone Yard Devotional was one of the books I was most looking forward to from it. Now that I've read it I'm left a little disappointed. That's not to say that this isn't good - it is, and I liked it. I just didn't love it in the way I thought I might.
Part of the reason for that is that there just wasn't enough of it for me. The big question I wanted answering was why has this woman given up her entire life to come and live with these nuns? The answer is sort of gestured towards but never properly explained, and it leaves a hollow in the book that isn't filled by anything else. It felt incomplete, and I couldn't get past that.
The blurb also sells a much more dramatic book than we actually get. What we're told is that "a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past". What we actually get is a woman the narrator bullied as a kid who largely leaves her alone. I got the sense that the narrator thinks she was much more important - much more of a main character, if you like - than she actually was, and it made it hard to empathise with her. (This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I try to avoid reading blurbs where possible, simply because I find they often sell an entirely different novel to the one I end up reading).
I did enjoy this, and I particularly liked the opening section reminiscing about the narrator's first experiences at the convent. I just wish there was a little more connective tissue between that opening section and the section that follows.