One fatal crash. Two colliding worlds. Three wrecked lives.
School teacher Ben is driving on the motorway, on his usual commute to work.
A day like any other…
Except for one man who, in a final despairing act, jumps in front of Ben’s car, turning the teacher’s world upside down in a single horrifying instant…
Wracked with guilt and desperate to clear his conscience, he develops a friendship with Alice, the dead man’s wife, and her 7-year-old son Max.
But as he tries to escape the trauma of the wreckage, could he go too far in trying to make amends?
How would you cope, knowing you’d caused someone’s death?
Audiobook Published: February 6th 2020 by Trapeze
My Review
I was sent a digital copy of this audiobook by the publisher as part of the blog tour and in return for an honest review. Not sure they’ll send me others because I’m not going to be entirely positive about this book.
I liked the premise, it’s a good ‘what if’, and the characters are very different from each other, different backgrounds and histories that are part of the text. The narration, and the voice actors, was very good. I got a lot from the intonation and pronunciation. A lot of background information beyond the text, from listening to the way the narrators embodied the characters.
The setting is very clear – middle class, middle of the road, middle England. The characters fit the setting. Ben’s parents are really quite funny in a ‘Mrs Bucket’ sort of way.
Unfortunately, the plot wasn’t as defined as the setting and characters. It didn’t seem to have a direction or any thrust, it meandered. Alice and Ben are deeply unlikeable people. Alice is damaged and unpleasant, and Ben is immature and stalkery. Now, normally I would have just found that fascinating and want to see how things would turn out, because complex characters are more interesting that simple ones and a good strong plot can do wonders with those, but they just didn’t interest me, it fell flat. That is, I think the author tried too hard to make them ‘complex’ and ‘interesting’. And Max is way too perfect to be real. And that ‘trying too hard’ put me off.
This book didn’t work for me. Might work for someone else and it certainly got a lot of 4 and 5 stars on GoodReads, so it could just be a personal taste thing.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 