[SFD]∎ [PDF] One Good Turn Kate Atkinson 9780552772440 Books

One Good Turn Kate Atkinson 9780552772440 Books

Download As PDF : One Good Turn Kate Atkinson 9780552772440 Books

One Good Turn Kate Atkinson 9780552772440 Books

What a messy book! The author has captured the true messiness of human life that most of us experience ourselves in the situations of Jackson Brodie and five or six other main characters. Her expertise is that she manages to tie up all the messy loose ends in the climactic scene at the housing tycoon Hatter's palatial home. This complicated story, which combines whodunit mystery and fascinating character studies, uses plot twists and shockers. For better or worse, the story also contains nearly all the elements of a slapstick farce, wherein identity mistakes and glaring ignorance of facts lead to the aforementioned bloody but comical resolution scene at the Hatter residence. The satisfyingly complex action moves right along and keeps the reader pretty well riveted. The only irritant I noticed was the seemingly excessive obtuseness on the part of the police in their failure to connect the dots in their overlapping investigations. Of course, obtuseness is an essential part of any farce.


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One Good Turn Kate Atkinson 9780552772440 Books Reviews

First, Kate Atkinson is a terrific novelist. And her Jackson Brodie series employs her trickster sensibility that places this series set in Scotland above the usual pack of brooding detectives and flayed victims found in most books of this genre, particularly those set in Northern Europe. For one, although Brodie is divorced and has a daughter (why do all these detectives have daughters?) he is not an alcoholic and he is unabashedly nice. And the plotting of each of the books in this series involves the convergence of chance events and random characters, which is not so much magical realism as magical coincidence. I've read four in the series so far but just chose this one to review. It applies to all of them.
Triple Combination Plot, Character Development, Writing. The first Kate Atkinson book I read was one I picked up haphazardly off a library shelf, because "Life After Life" (the one I was looking for) was missing. This turned out to be the third in the Jackson Brodie series, and I was hooked. Delighted to go back and read the first two later. "One Good Turn" is the second in the series, and like the others, the best thing about it for me is how Atkinson gets inside the heads of the characters, and seems to be portraying people we might well encounter ourselves. The writing is terrific (I personally enjoy the geography of Yorkshire). And the plots, though intricate, jumping back and forth in time, are paced in a way that it makes it hard to put down the book. A+ from me!
I have just finished this novel and thought it was a lovely gem of storytelling, complex and rich in plot and character. Some reader/reviewers here have complained about the coincidences in the book, saying they were unlikely and implausible. I disagree and think that life is, indeed, full of such coincidences and strange occurrences and associations; the "six degrees of separation" is one popular example. There are coincidences in this book but they do not seem false or contrived; they just seem to make for a puzzle, a maze, complexity that is similar to "real life." It is a novel, however, and not a "true crime" or non-fiction work; the author has license and liberty to tell a story and reveal characters, and Atkinson does both with great skill and talent. I loved the characters for their rich lives of delicate fragility and tough complexity. Like many - and unlike the author, as one learns in the interview that is printed in the back of the paperback copy that she did with Nancy Pearl - I like Jackson Brodie, but I really liked the character, Reggie Chase - a sixteen year old girl, an orphan and a tough, delicate "lost soul" who reminded me of some of my favorite characters in favorite novels (Scout, Frankie Adams, et al.) Louise Monroe, is an interesting character, but a very annoying one, to me anyway, and I was troubled by the way she treated her husband - and yet it's her character and I'm just there to read and fall into the story. This is top-notch writing, a very engaging and interesting story, and a complex mystery, in that order. The writing is lovely and more sophisticated than most "mysteries", although this novel is more than an example of that genre. Great enjoyable fall into great story and characters. I would give it as a gift and read it again - there's some praise.
I was hoping this book would be a return to form after a poor second outing for Jackson Brodie. The first book - Case Histories- had some real effort behind it and I thought was an excellent book in the Hilary Mantel vein. The second seemed to be phoned in and this one is not much different. Above all the plot is reliant almost entirely on deus ex machina to move it forwards. Pretty much everything seems to be coincidence stemming from a train accident that has nothing to do with the characters other than allow the writer an easy way to throw them all together. I had the feeling that the book was just what was in the author's head that day. None of the events seemed motivated by a story related theme and much of the action was not believable. The opening is good. Unlike installment 2 it follows the crime/mystery/police procedural format and begins with strong initial sequence; unfortunately the strong beginning never becomes a coherent story. it just flops around getting weaker towards a highly unsatisfactory conclusion. One has the feeling that the author is not really comfortable with the genre. Although the writing can be very strong - nice insights into how people think and act, it's all off the cuff and extraneous to the core narrative.

A minor concern is a lot of grammatical errors which were distracting "nauseous" alot instead of nauseated, wrong tense (was instead of were in the conditional) and occasionally the wrong person. Also, the edition repeated the last page in each of the last three chapters and appears to have omitted the correct pages.

A talented writer but this outing needed a lot more plot outline to be built into it and perhaps less digression on characters or facts that play no role whatsoever in the underlying story.

The hero is not active at all but is always acted upon
What a messy book! The author has captured the true messiness of human life that most of us experience ourselves in the situations of Jackson Brodie and five or six other main characters. Her expertise is that she manages to tie up all the messy loose ends in the climactic scene at the housing tycoon Hatter's palatial home. This complicated story, which combines whodunit mystery and fascinating character studies, uses plot twists and shockers. For better or worse, the story also contains nearly all the elements of a slapstick farce, wherein identity mistakes and glaring ignorance of facts lead to the aforementioned bloody but comical resolution scene at the Hatter residence. The satisfyingly complex action moves right along and keeps the reader pretty well riveted. The only irritant I noticed was the seemingly excessive obtuseness on the part of the police in their failure to connect the dots in their overlapping investigations. Of course, obtuseness is an essential part of any farce.