A Tidy Ending - Joanna Cannon

Author: Joanna Cannon,

Narrator: Lissa Berry

Genre: Contemporary Mystery-Drama.

Rating: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Outlier review alert! Strongly mixed feelings, but the ending was too farfetched for me to relish the overall book. I started off with 4.5 stars and my rating kept steadily dipping as I progressed through the book.

Story:

Linda has a dark secret connected to her childhood in Wales. Now she lives in a quiet suburban neighbourhood with her husband Terry. While she goes about her routine work, she wonders if there’s more to life, as she can see in the glossy magazines that keep coming to her house, but addressed to the earlier owner Rebecca Finch. Linda decides that the best way for her to have the lifestyle she wants is to track down Rebecca and emulate her. While all this is happening, there are some young girls murdered in the neighbourhood and Terry is suddenly acting fishy. If there any connection between all of these happenings? You’ll need to read the book and find out.

The story is written in the first person perspective of Linda and comes from two timelines – Now' and what I suppose is 'Then'.

The story has four broad tracks – Linda’s dark past, the girls’ murders, Terry’s fishy behaviour, and Linda’s obsession with Rebecca Finch. While there is an underlying thread connecting everything, it doesn’t become apparent until the final 10% or so. So it is a long, slow-drawn-out book where the middle seems very repetitive. (Having the audiobook helped somewhat with the slow pacing.)

On the positive side, there is plenty of dark humour in the book. There are loads of quotable quotes. The two timelines generate enough of a curiosity to know what’s happening (though this doesn’t work very well in the audiobook.)

Linda’s character is what will make or break the book for you. She is too sure of herself and her capability to judge people and situations, but it is very clear to us that she always jumps to the wrong conclusions. For a great part of the book, she comes out as likeable but overly naïve. Her fondness for her father despite the dark secret and her complicated relationship with her toxic mother make her more vulnerable in our eyes. But then comes the big reveal in the climax and it feels like we have been taken for a ride. This was where the book failed me. An unreliable narrator needs to be written very carefully in order to be convincing at the end, all the more so if the narration is in first person. A sudden turnaround doesn’t make any sense. Moreover, a character being unreliable unknowingly is very different from one acting unreliable deliberately. The latter style never works for me.

Most of the other characters aren’t layered. None of the characters are likeable. Linda comes close to being pitied but even that disappears as the story progresses and she turns quite annoying. Hardly anything happens till the first 80% and then there’s a surge of activity. Linda’s character is stuck on repeat ‘duh’ mode until the surprise climax. There’s loads of rambling as well, a disappointing side-effect of the unreliable first person pov. I would have still rated this book a 3.5 had it had a better ending. But it was too farfetched for my liking and came out of nowhere. I always prefer endings to be gradually built up from the plot. (Such an irony that I hated the ending of a book named “A Tidy Ending”!)

The audiobook, clocking at almost 11 hours, is narrated by Lissa Berry. She does a good job of narrating Linda and has a lovely, honey-smooth voice but I somehow kept tuning off from her narration due to the way Linda’s character was written. It took me 3-4 tries to get into the audiobook and stay focussed.

Lately, there have been too many books on dysfunctional characters with mental health issues, so a book needs to have something special to make it stand out. This one didn’t do anything for me. I feel that I might have liked this book slightly more if I had read it, but I doubt it would have been a 5 star read for me even then. It was more tedious than tidy for me.

Then again, this is an outlier opinion. So please check out the other reviews before you make up your mind. Note that Goodreads is showing this book to be a mystery. There’s hardly any edge-of-the-seat kind of suspense in the story. Most of it reads like contemporary drama. So keep your expectations in accordance with this. This will work very well for book club discussions.

My thanks to HarperCollins UK Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “A Tidy Ending”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook. Sorry this didn’t work out so well.