Rating: ★★
Maud is losing her memory. There’s a lot that she isn’t sure about anymore, but there is one thing that is confident of – her friend, Elizabeth, is missing. She can feel in her bones that Elizabeth needs help, but nobody around her believes her. In her confusion, she remembers a second unsolved mystery – that of her missing sister Sukey. Maud sets out on a mission to solve these two mysteries, but needs to fight her fading memory to do so.
One thing that I really liked about this book was its portrayal of dementia. It felt very realistic and matched up with my experience of the illness in family and friends. Maud can remember things, but she loses her grasp on them and is left feeling lost and confused. This book felt very well-researched in terms of dementia and how it works, and this made for a very moving and emotional experience.
On the other hand, Healey’s dedication to this accurate portrayal of dementia meant that the book rapidly became repetitive and draining. At the beginning, it was touching and endearing but after a few chapters it became a bit – sorry if this sounds harsh – boring. I also struggled with the feeling that, from very early on, I had figured it out, but I had to sit through pages and pages of Maud piecing things together which she had already pieced together a few pages before. Finally, whilst I enjoy an unreliable narrator, that is different to a narrator that forgets what has just happened on every single page. Perhaps this could have been lightened if Maud’s dementia were in a slightly earlier stage, or simply if the mystery were a bit more mysterious!
There were some quite humorous parts. I particularly enjoyed a scene where Maud puts an advert in a newspaper for her missing friend, but the member of staff at the newspaper filling out her form for the advert thinks that she is putting an advert out for a missing cat! This scene made me chuckle quite a bit, as did some of Maud’s exchanges with her family members at several parts.
On another note, I listened to this book in audiobook format which I can definitely recommend. The actors really bring the story to life and particularly the actress who voices Maud, who really captures her emotions of fear and sadness perfectly.
Overall, I can appreciate what Emma Healey was trying to do with this book and I appreciate the representation of dementia so heavily in a book. However, I simply found that the unreliableness of the narrator went a bit too far and made the book repetitive and dull after a while, and this was trumped by the fact that the mystery was not too mysterious in the end.
Ink Drops Books 