Alex:
Product Description from Amazon
"Welcome to Life" is a novel about family, friendship and becoming a grown-up. Adolescence is never easy. But for fourteen-year-old Freya - brought up by parents who act like teenagers, and surrounded by teenagers all too desperate be grown-ups - it's bewildering. All she wants is a bit of attention...But her parents are too wrapped up in their own dramas to register Freya's. Her mother, Millie, is inconsistent, irresponsible, and wants her daughter to be her best gal pal. Unfortunately she finds her utterly inscrutable, a disappointment and a chore, and her fondest communications reach Freya in the form of notes left on the fridge door: 'Feed rabbits'; 'Sandwich for lunch - cheese in fridge only one day out of date', and 'Be less scary'. Freya's dad, Hugh, is in the property game. 'When there's a recession on, you have to keep an eye on the figures,' he told her once. If only he'd listened to his own advice...In desperation, Freya goes looking for love in all the wrong places. And when her parents break dramatically with marital convention, they leave Freya in turmoil as she realizes that, for Millie and Hugh, three is not a crowd...
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It was interesting for me to read this book, as I was living in Cambridge as a (slightly older) teen than heroine Freya at the time the book is set. It is a very interesting snapshot of eight or so weeks of burgeoning womanhood, a time when the summer holidays made all the difference (so we thought) to the person we would be on the return to school. I think Alice de Smith captures the agony of these teenage growing pains very well.. and Freya is never quite sure who she is and what's expected of her... Where is she in life? The story is incredibly slight and the surrounding characters are given very little flesh and for literary creations behave annoyingly inconsistently. People are described as one thing, and then behave in others - it is a fault in the writing not in the character make-up.
Also, I didn't recognise Cambridge... Her geography is all wrong. Occasionally landmarks are thrown in for good measure, and local celebs from my youth spring up but for no reason. De Smith would have been better served creating extraneous characters and places using her talent as a writer, rather than relying on exisitng places and people that brought nothing to the story...
On the whole I found the book fairly amusing, and whilst the subject, style and moral are nothing new, it reminded me a little of Victoria Wood's stand-up.. Snappy, zippy, some GREAT one liners, but ultimately you never learn anything from it...
Nic:
Wow. You got so much more out of this than I did! It's such a shame you weren't at the lunch to lend a different perspective (and enjoy a fabulous lunch!).
I wondered who Alice slept with in order to get this trite, underdeveloped, poorly-written, uninspiring (I hesitate to call it) book published.
After lunch walk:
