Dear all my lovely followers…

Dear all my lovely followers, 

Thank you for not abandoning me. I’m sorry I’ve been so rubbish at The Little Bookworm lately I haven’t really been reading much. I’m determined to start again and work harder than ever. I’m also looking into different types of reviewing as well as novels and my own poetry (such as my latest poem ‘You’) I will hopefully be starting a music review page to expand what I can do and create a bit more variety. 

 

Thank you so much again, 

Much love 

Chloe 

You. (a poem)

You will never understand what you took

away from me. 

What you did. 

When I sit and think about you,

which isn’t often I might say, 

I think of all the things I could do. 

 

I’m not angry now, I’m not , I’m not, I’m NOT! 

Apart from sometimes, 

sometimes when I wish you’d bleed. 

Not from the blood in your veins but on the inside.

I hope you get left behind

I hope you feel what you’ve done when you are abandoned

When you are wondering who you are, what you’ve done. 

 

So now I’m going to walk away, I’ll hear about the games you play

and as for them? They’ll learn the error of their ways. 

They’ll think about the times they had, the love, the fun, the dreams. 

When they’re tied to their meaningless job, married to a tyrant and a few sprogs too. 

They’ll realise what reduced them to this, 

They’ll realise it was 

You. 

One Step Too Far – Tina Seskis ***

 

 

‘They’ll be better off without me’ 

Heartbroken and pushed to her limit Emily makes a decision that many of us only dream of, she walks out of her life. 

Have you ever looked at the departures board at a train station and just thought Why don’t I just go, leave all of this behind me and just leave? The answer? You have. You can lie to yourself all you want but each and every one of us at some point have just wanted to leave and start a fresh. At the start of the novel we don’t understand Emily’s motives but we are deeply aware something has gone wrong. Leaving with the memories of her husband and son Emily gets on a train to London and attempts not to look back. As she quickly learns the ways of a London runaway Emily, now reinvented as Cat, tries desperately to shake off her past although it always comes back to haunt her…

The novel is intertwined between a mix of characters, Emily, Cat, Ben, Caroline, Frances and Angel to name a few. While this makes One Step Too Far interesting and puts together the pieces of the puzzle it is also a little confusing at times. You generally know  who is speaking but there are always questions, where are they? What is the time period is this part is set in?  For example the novel starts from Emily’s perspective and it appears to be pretty straight forward, we are then transported to the birth of twin girls and a mother who simply does not have enough love for two. That quick change is very important to the novel later on but doesn’t seem to make much sense initially. I’m quite used to novels like this however I think that for some readers this may become pretty complicated. I don’t say this lightly, even I had to go back sometimes and re read to make sure I actually understood what was going on. There were some important things towards the end that I missed and others that didn’t make sense to me until a much later point, although I do believe this was Seskis’ intention.  This is true of the ending of the novel, about 90% of the way though I got very confused and a little frustrated because of a significant change. As my regular readers know I don’t like spoiling things for you so I can’t reveal why I was so irritated at one point. 

Despite any irritation I felt towards the end (although may I add this was resolved by the last page), the character of Emily/Cat fascinated me. I feel that Seskis has tapped into a gold mine after creating this plot in the sense that anyone can relate to Emily. She relates to our wildest desires of simply uprooting and getting away with it. I’m not saying I want to just dispensary but everyone’s had days where they wish they could reinvent themselves or just start over. That said I feel that Emily was made into a real person, it’s impossible to like her all the time. I sat with book in hand feeling so many emotions, I smiled at the happy times, I despaired at her lowest, I absolutely loathed her at times, I laughed occasionally and I gasped as I finally got to her darkest secret (although I’ll admit I was a little confused too). 

I would generally recommend this novel to friends as I do think it is a good read, that said I do feel that sometimes there are too many twists and turns (especially at the end). I’ll give the novel 3 stars because it reflects my feelings of being right in the middle. I do like the plot and the characters but at the same time I struggled at times with quite important aspects and even now after finishing feel I may need to go back and re read some parts. I also felt that the ending kind of took away from some of the realism of the novel as a whole, however I would still recommend this to a friend as a good read.