[Elitiachirl]

I was looking at Amazon earlier and it's getting absolutely raves from people ? apart from a very few who seem to be sharing essentially the same view of it as that of both of us.

I was handed it on Friday to review for a quarterly direct-mailing magazine with a large readership; most of whom are women, many of whom are not well educated and amongst whom the prime choice of newspaper is the Daily Mail. So we do six short reviews (books, DVDs or CDs) in each issue and we try to be guided largely by the nature of the readership and not what we ourselves want to read. In this case, the person who sorts out the reviews gave me Child 44, thinking that a thriller would be acceptable for that readership, but the Booker thing would give us a way of encouraging them to look further. He's doing Netherland ? on the basis that that's our 'ambitious' item for the quarter.

About half way through, I was still going to write it up ? just on the basis of it being a thriller. But since we have such little space, we don't really do negative reviews. I texted him last night to tell him I'm not wasting space on it and he can give me something else if he wants.

It really is the worst piece of fiction I've read in a very, very long time.