Wasted Journey

[dotinthesky]

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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Comments

[changeling72.livejournal.com]

It rather makes one wonder how it came to be published in the first place?

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

From reading other reviews on GoodReads, it seems that the "event" later in the novel is the main clincher - a ship disaster based on a real event in the 19th century. Maybe that was the selling point for the publishers? But I still think that's not good enough - Birch should have been capable to draw the reader towards the event through suspense and good characterisation.

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

Sounds like someone read Life of Pi and figured it would be good for recycling.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Life of Pi recycled for the story, Cloud Atlas recycled for the cover (as millionreasons pointed out.)

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

Holy cow, that's blatant. How depressing if that's what publishers are resorting to.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

It's the music industry's ethos taking over the book world.

[zenithed.livejournal.com]

Are they doing that with album covers now? I can't imagine they'd be much of a selling point any more.

Apparently there's a growing phenomenon of copycat e-books taking off with similar titles to bestsellers.

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I could see that - especially in the young people dark romance market.

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

It sounds as though it's been specifically written for the same market as The Life of Pi. The cover's a rip-off of Cloud Atlas as well. Is it just me, or are mass market novels becoming more and more indentikit?

[petercampbell.livejournal.com]

Oh bugger. Someone else has already pointed out the same similarities. That's what I get for posting without reading the comments first...

[commonpeople.livejournal.com]

Everyone at my bookclub felt the same. Someone even saw an interview with her on Richard and Judy and they said she came across as a Wikipedia researcher - that she chose a real life story (the sinking of the Essex) to turn into a novel and everything else was padding.