I’ve been a little slack with these reviews so am currently playing catch-up. To make amends, here’s the first of my MA reading list 100-word-reviewed:

Cover blurb for Richard Ford’s Wildlife favourably compares the short novel to Catcher in the Rye. As someone who found Salinger’s classic a little underwhelming I would go further and say that Ford’s coming of age novel, telling the story of a marriage in crisis filtered through the eyes of teenage narrator Joe, is better. Ford’s use of deceptively simple language and symbolism creates a layered narrative, its tension generated through the relationship between Joe’s inadequate narration and the reader’s clearer understanding of events. A simultaneously dramatic and tender story of the loss of innocence with a great first line:

‘In the fall of 1960, when I was 16 and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him.’