Illiterarty.com Book reviews and blogs by Bridget

Mildly disappointing, but only compared to the insanely high standards I have come to expect from Mr de Berniéres and his extreme awesomeness as an author.

When autistic fifteen year old Christopher John Francis Boone discovers his neighbour’s dog, Wellington, dead on the lawn with a gardening fork sticking in his side, he decides to investigate.

Y'know how all my book reviews start with "y'know how?" Y'know how I recently accused Chuck Pahlaniuk of writing a novel that oversold its blurb.. y'know?

If this was the beginning of a Miyazaki movie, it would be a montage of bored office workers, each with cheeky-eyed sprites escaping their wasted minds, flitting out the windows and through the skies of the globe to gather together in space as one enormous totally sweet unicorn with a GSOH.

If this was an autobiography, it would be effing awesome, but I’d also like to imagine that Chuck will always be too busy out there doing stuff to pen his own memoirs.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Return Of The Dancing Master. I guess from the cover I was expecting a pulp thriller of the most noxious and basic kind, with a name selected for whimsy and to sucker in people like me. What I DIDN’T look at was the author’s name... Henning Mankell. Turns out he’s Swedish. Who knew? Anyway, more to the point, the book was actually originally written in Swedish, and then translated into English. Which gives the whole experience less of a thriller feeling and more of a smugly-reading-foreign-text feeling. Which was nice.