TT:DNR

 I've only recently become acquainted with the meaning of the common social media acronym TL:DNR which apparently stands for Too Long, Do Not Read, or in some cases Did Not Read. I think it's a bit useless really; if you didn't read it why are you flagging it up/commenting on it, and if you've read it, was it really too long? 

Be that as it may, it does open itself up to snappy summaries for book reviews, for example 

TG: DNR (gory)

TB: DNR (boring)

TS: DNR (sentimental. Or silly)

ad infinitum I suppose. 

And in my title the second T is for tedious which is what this book was.

Someone presented on it in Prague and I was quite intrigued so ordered it from the library when I got back. 

It takes up where Shelley's Frankenstein left off and is the story of the woman who is made to be the monster's wife (it says on the back). 

It's a debut novel and suffers a lot from general debut novel problems. Overwritten. Gaps in the  narrative where presumably the writer has forgotten that they haven't told the reader things. Characters that aren't fully drawn. Far too much generic  description. Repetitive and long drawn out climax. cf Peter Jackson, LOTR:TRotK

There are also some specific problems. It's supposedly set on Hoy, but if you weren't told that you'd never know. It could be any small  island with a tiny and isolated  population. There is nothing in the book that is specific to Hoy except perhaps an attempt to describe the Old Man, and it's only a perhaps.  In fact there is nothing specific even to Orkney in general and one glaring error, as the writer describes one of the characters as seeing a stoat. Many many LOLS at that, as there were no stoats in Orkney until very recently (within the last five years)  and the poor animals are the subject of a vicious and systematic attempt by Scottish Heritage and the RSPB to exterminate them. And it's such a live issue here that Horsley could have found it out very easily and altered her mammal description accordingly. 

The man problem though is that I just don't have the mind set for this sort of book. It's very Gothic which means no-one ever cleans anything properly and the characters do stupid things, chiefly not telling each other what's going on. The man protagonist in this book has that last fault in spades. A timely and heeded call to 'Run away, run away, as fast as you can', or even confiding in her grandmother or the Minister  would have helped her avoid a lot of unpleasantness and misunderstanding. 

But then I suppose there would have been no book. 

Do not by the way let me tell you not to read it if it sounds like your sort of thing. It just isn't mine.