This is the third Moriarty book I have read (Feeling Sorry for Celia, and The Year of Secret Assignments - the American title - are the others) and the one that is the most puzzling to me. I can't figure out if I like it or not.
The Story: Bindy (short for Belinda) is a genius and wants everyone to know it. She makes a hobby of listening to people and their conversations and typing them up on her laptop. She has managed to alienate everyone who knows her by her air of superiority and her inability to relate to them. Then, during her year 11 year, her world starts to fall apart. Her parents are away for their jobs and she is staying with her uncle and aunt. And Bindy herself has increasing bouts of headaches, stomach aches, and general illness. Her grades start to slip. But the key problem is her FAD class - Friendship and Development class - a sort of encounter group. Intended to help students with personal issues, it instead intensifies Bindy's problems. And her life seems to go consistently down hill.
There is no need to give away the ending, so I won't discuss it. But the whole thing just seems a bit too unlikely to be believable. The other two books by Moriarty seemed much more real. This one, well, just seems a bit surreal. And that makes the characters almost like caricatures, rather than real people with real lives. I would like to like Bindy. I am very interesting in extremely intelligent kids, but it is hard to like Bindy as she appears in the story. There is just something lacking about the way her situation is developed. I wish I could put my finger on it better, but, for now, I can't.
Hey there,
ReplyDeleteI read this book a couple of days ago and quite enjoyed it. It was quite boring in the beginning and I thought the story was going nowhere. I was also waiting to find out why Bindy lost interest in her studies. Quite interesting. Here is my review of it. :)
You know, I am thinking that maybe this is one of the few books I feel like re-reading. It is almost as though there was something missing in ME at the time when I read it, so that if I read it again it might be a totally different experience.
ReplyDeleteOr not. Who knows?