The Rabbit Back Literature Society by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

We reviewed this in November, so this is very late but I'll try and remember what we spoke about.

This book is bonkers, semi fantasy set in Finland where we assume most people believe in fairies and elves. There was so much going on in this book that we didn't know where to start.

There was the odd Laura White who was collecting children and then disappeared, was that relevant to the story? Probably only because it enabled Ella to go about asking questions and finding out what happened to the 11th member.

We liked the idea of books getting viruses and re-writing themselves, that could be a whole book in itself. We didn't like the rather random sex scenes, three quite disturbing images of rape, grossly fat people and doing it with other people in the room.

A highly amusing if somewhat confusing story.

Concept: 7/10
Plot: 5/10
Ending: 5/10
Add a twist: Take all the twists out and start again!
Page Turner? Yes
Who to slap: Laura White
Where's the cheese? Squashing sex scene
Would we recommend? 10/10
Better as a ... fairy story

Total: 7/10

Our next book will be Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw

We had a long discussion at this month's book group meeting, late into the night, unfortunately that discussion was not about this book. We didn't like this one and here's why ...

We found the first half of this book dragged, the characters were confusing and we didn't really care about them or the storyline. The second half was better but not much. We liked Phoebe when she worked for the spa and we liked Gary when he had the breakdown, after that we kind of lost interest.

It was quite a depressing book, the picture painted of Shanghai was that it was full of con men, it made you lose faith in humanity a little. We found the way all the characters finally crossed paths a little contrived and not really needed in all cases.

That's pretty much it. We then had a little experiment, instead of our usual scoring system we each gave the book an overall mark out of 10 and then saw if that matched what our scoring system found.

The average overall score was 5.5/10

Concept: 7/10
Plot: 3/10
Ending: 2.5/10
Cover - we've decided to scrap this category as it seems to affect our scores and not in the way we'd like. Sorry Rachel.
Page Turner: 0/10
Who to slap? Everyone
Where's the cheese? The self-help extracts.
Would we recommend? 0/5
Better as a ... fortune cookie (money doesn't equal happiness)
Add a twist: Justin and Yinghui get together.

Total: 3/10

Our next book will be 'The Rabbit Back Literature Society' by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen which we'll read for our November meeting.. Next meeting is at Lisa's.