I read this book more or less at one sitting.I alternated between admiring this book - and getting quite cross with it. I thought it was a mess. But a brilliant one. On one level I admire the author's ambition. The book tries to be everything. It's a romance, a historical novel, a medidation on time and nature, a work of magic realism, a homage to Shakespearean comedy, and an inspired set of variations and improvisations.In places the writing is wonderfully noir, and there are sections which are...

This book certainly presents me with a conundrum. The good: the writing style - it a pleasure to read; so jam-packed that, what in other books might seem overdone, here it was relatively light-hearted and literate. The moderate: the initial light-heartedness of the narrative belied the delicate, familiar strains of melancholy and fate, as the characters were lost and had suffered loss and had never entirely recovered.The book is an interesting ... melange, I am not even entirely certain how to d...

i give it a three even though i enjoyed reading it in a four star kind of way. the three star means there are better books by her out there, but that this one is fun, if imperfect. and it's a shame, because she really tells a good story. this one was just a little too ambitious with what it was trying to squeeze in, and there were too many storylines that either didn't connect gracefully, or had to be absorbed by inference. does that make sense?? i am inarticulate. towards the end it gets especi...

I'm a big fan of Kate Atkinson's witty prose and oddball characters, but I have to admit that this novel had a degree of weirdness beyond that found in those of her novels which I have read to date. In a mix of first person and third person narratives, it tells the story of Isobel Fairfax, a teenage girl from a most peculiar family, who finds herself unaccountably slipping through pockets of time. And that's the most easily understood part of the plot, because as time goes on, Isobel's life beco...

My GR friends will know that I am a big Kate Atkinson fan. I sometimes feel that she doesn't get the critical acclaim she deserves - maybe it's because her books sell so well that she is often tagged as "Popular Fiction"? Anyway, Human Croquet is one that had passed me by until now. It doesn't seem to be talked about as much as her other novels, but I reckon it's up there with some of her best work.16-year-old Isobel Fairfax is our narrator. She lives with her family in the run-down Fairfax Mano...

Have you ever read a comedy of manners that involves time travel? Or a Gothic novel that takes place in the 1960s? Or a coming-of-age story whose rites of passage include meeting Shakespeare, witnessing several murders, burning down a house, and turning into a tree?Kate Atkinson once again blew me away with this book. I had just finished reading "Case Histories" (5 stars), an unforgettable non-traditional mystery and expertly woven tale of identity and attachment, when I found "Human Croquet" on...

Human Croquet by one of my favorite British authors, Kate Atkinson, did not disappoint. Ms. Atkinson's writing is marked not only by beautiful and haunting prose but her sharp writing can only be described as audacious. Spending time with Kate Atkinson is always magical.As the New York Times Review Notable Book of the Year reported, it is a part fairy tale, part mystery and part coming-of-age novel about Isobel Fairfax in the 1960's British suburb of Lythe, once the heart of an Elizabethan feuda...

Kate Atkinson certainly knows how to tell a story. The idea behind this book was, as always, highly original. Very cleverly told! The title is superbly chosen.

If you loved Atkinson's Life After Life or John Crowley's Little, Big, you have to read this immediately. The jacket copy hooked me like crazy, but the book isn't exactly as advertised. It's just as good, though weirder and more impressionistic than I expected--but with enough threads of story to keep me hooked. I'm a plot junkie, but in Atkinson's hands I enjoyed the flights of micro-to-macro, universe-spanning fancy nearly as much as finding out "what happens next." Even when she's not writing...

I love Kate Atkinson but don't feel this novel is one of her best. Her prose style is still wonderful but this one seemed to lack her usual humour. In places I found it overwhelmingly sad and in others I was totally confused. The ending wasn't as satisfying as it might have been and I felt more than a little let down. Maybe when I've mulled it over a bit more I may feel differently. Still good though, if not particularly enjoyable because of difficult subject matter.Buddy read with Kim :-).

This book wants to be in a cage match with McEwan's Atonement, but, lacking confidence in itself, straps some badly explained timetravel to its breasts and tries to distract everyone.Incest! Timetravel! Stolen babies! More incest! Family history! Teenage debauchery! Groundhog Day! Murder! All that....and more. Coming up next on What The Actual Fuck Channel.

Surreal but grounded, quirky but not frivolous, endearing and sad- this is a mystery of lost identity, lost souls, crimes of passion, time warps and warped minds. It's delicious, clever, unsettling, grim and guffaw-inducing. Atkinson is a category unto herself.

I think that if there was some kind of Project Runway for the literary set, Tim Gunn would have taken one look at this book and told Kate Atkinson to bring an editing eye to it. There are so many interesting elements to this—the humour, the meta elements, the mixture of history and imagination—but for me it failed to become a cohesive whole, experimenting with different forms but never quite settling on one of its own. I could see what Atkinson was aiming for—looking at how the stories change wi...

Opinions about this book seem to be divided. Some of the devoted readers of Kate Atkinson are disappointed, some love it. I belong to the second fraction. I was, I admit, slightly apprehensive before what is described as ”Shakespearean time warps” and frequent changing of perspective, but I found it all far more natural then expected. I loved Isobels sharp and witty voice that led me through this non-linear story as if I was a blindfolded ”ball” in the game of human croquet - from a hoop to hoop...

I'm torn about this book. On one hand I loved it. It's an impressive book. The writing is fantastic, superb, unique. I mean, she is a master at her craft. The structure is outstanding and also unique. It was one of those books that kept me up past my bedtime reading. And I'd walk around the house thinking about these characters and what was happening to them and I'd say to my husband (or whoever would listen) "This book is just so weird. Like, in a good way. One of the most unique things I've ev...

I really enjoyed this book. It is well written and chock full of eccentric characters realistically rendered. I'm rather fond of teenage characters( all those years of teaching high school) and Isobel is an endearing narrator . Her wry and witty perceptions of life prevent the tragic experiences she encounters from becoming too overwhelmingly depressing.While I expected time travel to play a more significant role in the book it seemed almost an afterthought . I usually don't enjoy that type of t...

Spoiler alert. The cleverness of the writing and the occasional insightful observation did not redeem this novel for me. Isobel is a sour, middling, middle-class teenager in 1960s Britain dealing with square peg friends, a vanished (murdered) mother, a distant father, an inept stepmother, etc. The fairy tale aspects of the plot left me cold; the frequent family violence and sexual taboos were without the requisite emotional impact or narrative weight. Characters die, young women are impregnated

Here's the thing. I really enjoyed 'Case Histories,' and was looking forward to reading Human Croquet. Anticipated it.But here's the rub, and this is the spoiler so don't read past here if you don't want to know, I think it's very bad form to mislead your reader. Less than a third of the way through the story something happens that the reader isn't told about. We continue reading thinking we are still in real life, when in reality everything that happens from that point in the story only happens...