Janice Hallett

Janice Hallett is a brilliant writer! I was so excited about her latest book - The Examiner. I just knew it would be another fantastic read. (It was!)

A group of six artists comprises the inaugural group of students hoping for a masters in art degree. They're a very mixed bunch but all are eager to take the course. And their professor is thankful for having the funding to run the program. But...

Oh, there's a fabulous but! Each one has their own agenda - and that's the fun of this book. Can you suss out what everyone is up to?

Hallett reprises the epistolary style of writing that I adore. The book is told through emails, coursework, texts, message boards, essays and their inner dialogue. The reader is the quiet seventh student, hearing everything that is going on and and trying to put the pieces together.

Good luck with that! The plotting is absolutely brilliant in my opinion. The clues are sometimes right there to see, while other times they're longshots. Hallett throws in more than one twist and turn on the way to the final 'aha'.

Fantastic! A very easy five stars.… (altro)

Over the last few years Janice Hallett seems to have revived, and reconfigured, the epistolary novel. The Appeal took the form of a dossier of documents passed by a barrister to two paralegals for their review of a case, and the reader encountered elements of the story in a fragmentary manner, with individual episodes recounted from different characters’ perspectives. In The Twyford Code, the reader was presented with what purported to be a series of transcripts from various conversations and interviews, while The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels comprised emails, SMS exchanges and other random documents.

I had found this a refreshing experiment with form, and it was clear from all of the books that Ms Hallett had the knack of constructing a sound story, and then delivering it in new ways. I wonder, however, whether in this last book she may have sent the pitcher to the well once too often. I was initially engrossed in this story, which follows a group of students as they embarking upon an arts Masters course, but after wading through seemingly interminable chat transcripts, journal entries and direct messages, I fairly soon found myself wonder why I was bothering.

While her previous novels had decently thought-out plots that enabled the strength of the story to transcend the format, this time I think she has fallen on fallow ground. I found finishing this book was an uphill struggle.… (altro)