Wasted Journey

Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I believe everyone should give a book a chance. I believe it's fair if that chance consists of the first 100 pages - if by that stage the author has failed to engage the reader, I say it's OK to put down the book and walk away.

I gave Carol Birch the benefit of 137 pages but it was no good. Jamrach's Menagerie is the tale of a boy from Bermondsey, South London, who comes into contact with a man who sells exotic animals after one of his tiger's escapes and nearly swallows the boy whole. Soon he's friends with two other children who are part of Jamrach's business and, later, he's given the chance to join Jamrach's ship expedition across the globe to capture a living dragon in a remote island.

The problem is that Birch's suspense-free novel fails at interesting characters, descriptive settings or anything resembling a story. And it was long listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction! We live in desperate times if weak writing like this is hailed as worthwhile reading. For every scene that might be noteworthy (the tiger's escape, the boys' participation in a whale hunt) there are tons of pages only serving to pad and push the reader's attention away.

Apparently, there's some point in the novel where an eyebrow raising event takes place. So shocking/disturbing/surprising that it's probably the reason the Orange Prize panel paid attention. Do I care enough to read on until I find out what that is? Is it a horrifying scene involving one of the novel's children? A gruesome murder? A paragraph that miraculously sparkles with life? Nope, I just don't care.

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