Amazing Grace Adams - Fran Littlewood - ★★.½

AUTHOR: Fran Littlewood

GENRE: Contemporary Drama

RATING: 2.5 Stars.

In a Nutshell: Started off wonderfully but then became farfetched. Some parts of it were really good but I wish the author wouldn’t have tried to throw in so many themes into a single plot. A decent debut work but not as good as it promised.

Story Synopsis:

Early 2000s. Grace is a polyglot who has just proven how amazing she is by winning the title of ’Polyglot of the Year.’

Today, Grace is a frustrated lady who, one day, just snaps and walks out of her car that is stuck is heavy traffic. He daughter Lotte doesn’t want to speak to her and her husband Ben has just served her divorce papers. But Grace is determined to show her daughter that she was amazing for a reason.

How 'Amazing Grace Adams' went from the heights to the depths within a period of two decades is what you need to read and find out.

The story comes to us in a limited third person perspective mostly of Grace. The main story is set on a single day, with two other timelines proving the background to the current events.

Where the book worked for me:

✔ I loved the idea of Grace and Ben being polyglots and meeting at a language convention. It was nice to see geeks come together in a romantic relationship.

✔ There are some beautiful foreign language words regularly scattered in the narrative. These were fun to learn.

✔ Some of the parenting struggles it depicts are scarily real.

Where the book left me with mixed feelings:

⚠ Grace’s character had many admirable points but also many annoying ones. While it is easy to admire her stance of standing for herself, her attitude and her approach towards problems didn’t endear her to me. I could sympathise with her only to a certain extent.

Where the book could have worked better for me:

❌ It was way too exaggerated, especially in the current timeline. It is implausible to believe that the whole day was just one horrible event after another. A balanced approach would have felt more realistic.

❌ There is a minor mystery in the ‘Four Months Before’ timeline. It’s absolutely easy to figure out the guilty party as soon as the said character comes on the page.

❌ As with most debut authors, this author too throws in everything plus the kitchen sink into her book. There are way too many themes, and most of them aren’t really necessary for the main storyline. They just end up diluting the main point of the book, which is that of a mother desperately wanting to connect with her teenaged daughter again.

❌ The plot comes to us in three circulating timelines: ‘Now’, ‘Four Months Earlier’, and 2002 (onwards). It is sometimes tricky to keep a track of what happened in which timeline. Moreover, the three-way narration ends up with some foreshadowing that kills the fun of discovery.

❌ To add to the troublesome triple timeline, each of the three tracks has flashbacks, creating a messy plot flow. Good luck to audiobook listeners on this one!

All in all, I had expected to love this book for it promised a strong middle-aged woman protagonist who had finally had enough of everyone taking her for granted. But the potential isn’t truly realised and the book ends up as an average read for me. The writer does have a lot of promise – it is no mean task to keep three timelines blending seamlessly. But perhaps a bit of editing and finetuning would have helped, especially in the over-the-top second half.

The author mentioned in her parting note that this plot was inspired by the movie ‘Falling Down’, so perhaps fans of that movie might like to give this a try. I haven’t watched that movie so I cannot make a comparison.

My thanks to Penguin Michael Joseph UK and NetGalley for the DRC of “Amazing Grace Adams”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.