What She Left
R. Richmond
Penguin UK – Michael Joseph
Michael Joseph
ISBN: 9780718179366
Description:
What She Left is a touching and exciting novel that surprises at every turn. Recommended for fans of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl or Jane Shemilt’s Daughter.
The Book
When Alice Salmon died last year, the ripples were felt in the news, on the internet, and in the hearts of those who knew her best.
But the person who knows her most intimately isn’t family or a friend. Dr Jeremy Cook is an academic whose life has become about piecing together Alice’s existence in all its flawed and truthful reality.
For Cooke, faithfully recreating Alice’s life – through her diaries, emails and anything using her voice – is all-consuming. He does not know how deep his search will take him, or the shocking nature of what he will uncover…
My View:
An interesting premise, that, ironically I thought was not best delivered in electronic format (ironic as the novel relies of the footprints of social media to share this story); for me this is largely about formatting – I always enlarge the font on my ereader and consequently this disrupts the original pagination which confused me as to whose voice I was hearing and in what time frame (I am assuming that if I had read this in paperback I would have noticed the page breaks/new entries/voices and followed the story easier). Unfortunately I found the constant skipping back and forth in time a little confusing and hard work to read and not compelling. But that is just me.
Update – the physical book arrived in the mail this week – just flicking though it I can see it will be much easier to read and keep up with events than in the ebook.
Reading, Writing and Riesling 
Oh, that’s good to know about the ereader issue, Carol. It sounds like an interesting premise, but I can see how it might be confusing if you can’t easily work out whose point of view is being shared and so on.
Sometimes a physical book is just so much better.
This book certainly sound interesting, but I know what you mean about ebook formatting! A lot of the books I’ve been reading recently have had this problem and it can make for a really frustrating read. 😦
Fran – I am slowly turning off eBooks fro that very reason.
It is definitely frustrating. I find that the BIG sellers tend to be formatted better, but that’s just sad because it puts me off supporting small presses 😦
Glad the hard copy book was easier to read… but I guess I still struggled with this one.
The hard copy sorted some of the issues…but not all. 🙂 I think I am moving away from ebooks…