When Anna graduates from Edinburgh University, she has no plan for
her future except a determination to distance herself from her
managing mother, Magda, in stultifying Somerset, by living in
London. She jumps at the offer of accommodation in her Aunt
Stella's flat, rejecting her mother's attempts to involve her in
her network of contacts. She prefers to speculate about her
enigmatic aunt's more attractive life, fuelled by telephone
messages from Stella's male friends. Alone in the flat while Stella
works abroad, Anna looks for a job in a bookshop and tries to find
her own adult self in a hostile and indifferent world. It may be
unfair to criticize a first novel too much. Mendelson has undoubted
writing talent, but it is as if Anita Brookner were trying to write
a younger version of Bridget Jones; a lot of navel-gazing
interspersed with annoying introspective listmaking, while what
plot there is crawls towards a less than startling denouement. I
found it hard to believe that someone of 22, with three years of
university behind her, could be quite so gauche and unaware. There
are tantalizing glimpses of a better novel waiting to be developed.
What sort of family has produced Anna's younger drug-taking sister,
and why has Anna cut her arms? What exactly has been the
relationship between Magda and Stella? There is some fertile ground
here, scattered with promising seeds, but they fail to germinate
satisfactorily. (Kirkus UK)
Anna Raine is desperate: to escape Somerset, to evade her mother, and above all, to find a model of adulthood on whom to base her future self. When Stella, her mother's thrillingly reckless younger sister offers her a Bloomsbury flat, Anna feels sure that some form of stardom will shortly follow.
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