Snap: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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It fits into my style of writing, which is about young people, for the most part, involved in a crime. Not that’s not to say there weren’t surprises because there were a couple of surprising reveals along the way.

The two I’m dreading the most are Washington Black and The Overstory… I keep hearing fantastic things but they just don’t seem like my kind of books. And I can’t end this review without commenting again on this book’s inclusion on the Man Booker longlist, which in itself caused quite a stir, raising the age-old question of whether genre fiction belongs in a literary prize. I thought it was a book about a boy and his grandmother and there just happened to be a serial killer. Their accent is extremely thick and there are villages in Macedonia whose dialects are very similar to the languages of the Balkan countries. Seriously, this book is such an excellent blend of the various sub-genres that make up crime fiction as a whole, which kept me turning the pages late into the night.Using crime to pay for their survival, Jack stumbles across his mother's killer and is determined to bring him/her to justice. I really took to Jack and especially Merry, I so wanted to dive into the novel to comfort and look after them myself.

Eventually her body is found, and the effect of her loss on the family is devastating and unbearable, especially for Jack’s father. He fears sleep because of the recurring nightmares, but he shows himself to be alert, quick thinking and practical.

I was really pleased I did, because it reaffirmed that you don’t have to conform to certain conventions in any genre.

Snap, despite the gushing comments on the cover, is a decent read but it is nothing terribly remarkable. Heavily pregnant Eileen Bright was riding in the family car with Jack, Joy and Merry ages 11,9 and 2 years old respectively.Three years later, Jack is still in charge – of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they’re alone in the house, and – quite suddenly – of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother. Your English is perfect but I’m just curious because I was talking to another ESL reader whose English is flawless, but she said books written in dialect are difficult for her to read.

It takes a while for the different threads in this book to come together, to weave their tapestry into the bigger picture, but it is a picture worth waiting for.There’s a cracking pace to Snap, partly achieved by the short snappy (forgive the pun) chapters so that I thought I’d just read one more, and then another, devouring the narrative very quickly because I found it highly entertaining. This character while appearing rough around the edges and pushing the boundaries of local police laws has a really big heart. Fresh from inner London, he is bored with mundane burglaries and keen to get his teeth into a murder investigation. Joy could not face being abandoned twice and became a hoarder: newspapers stacked everywhere throughout the house with only tiny pathways to maneuver, most of them with stories of her mother’s disappearance, but also any and every issue that the newsstand could produce, just in case something new appeared. Having seen some very mixed reviews about this one I was looking forward to getting my teeth into this read!