My Name Isn't Joe - James Thomas - ★★.½

AUTHOR: James Thomas

GENRE: Literary Fiction, Coming-of-age.

RATING: 2.5 stars.

In a Nutshell: A good book that will offer plenty to the right reader. But to me, this was a mixed experience, partly due to the writing style and partly due to my reading preferences. This is an outlier opinion.

Story Synopsis:

The eponymous Joe (whose "name isn't Joe"), is a loner in his early thirties, staying in a small rental apartment in London. With many failed relationships behind him and stuck in a dead-end job where he is almost invisible, Joe is existing more than living. Things take a turn when a new neighbour moves in next door. Her ten-year-old son Aaron provides Joe with a fresh zest for life, though the going isn’t always smooth.

The story comes to us in Joe’s first person perspective.

Bookish Yays:

😍 Aaron. He enters the plot only around the 20% mark but he immediately lifts the book with his presence and his attitude. To me, the best part of the book was this young fellow who was stronger and wiser beyond his years.

😍 The book highlights well the issues of being a loner in a crowded city. Joe’s feelings of depression and helplessness and his tactic of combating them with a self-deprecating wit feels true to life.

😍 There is a dash of humour that lightens the otherwise heavy tone of the book to a certain extent.

😍 The ending was apt for the book. Just the right level of ‘happy’ without being ‘perfect’.

😍 Joe uses bracketed sentences to add his personal comments or opinions to the ongoing events. Solely in this regard, I found him like my kindred spirit as hardly any review of mine goes without a similar add-on comment. 😆

Bookish Mixed Bags:

😐 There are some beautiful lines of thought when Joe in is one of his introspective moods. To those who like philosophical stuff (I don’t!), these will offer plenty to ponder upon. That said, I feel that these elements didn’t suit the tone of the book, nor fit in with the flow.

😐 The chapter title format is a bit unusual. Instead of having numbers or names, the title has vague time references such as ‘Two Days Later’ or ‘Fifteen Days Earlier’, followed by a bracketed note hinting at the events of that section. I did like this idea, especially at the start, as it offered a novel way of experiencing the chronology of the events. However, I lost track of the timeline after a point. The random flashbacks didn’t help matters.

😐 I like it when authors provide enough descriptions for me to be able to visualise the place or the characters. In this book, the characters are described in detail (a tad too much at times), but the description of the setting was underwhelming.

😐 The three dominant characters in the book were Joe, Aaron, and Aaron’s mom. Of these, Joe and Aaron were well-sketched, with their personalities helping us understand their actions. However, the depiction of Aaron’s mom (who stays unnamed throughout the book), was a hit-and-miss for me as there was no consistency to her detailing. The other secondary characters felt like strangers even till the end of the book.

😐 There’s a line in the book where Joe says, “I’m either mourning the loss of what was or just dreaming of what could be.” And this is exactly what he does for most of the book. If we look at this as a coming-of-age work (though Joe is beyond the age limit for that genre), the book functions better as Joe learns, over the period of the book, how not to look at the world only through the lens of “I, me, myself”. However, when one cannot connect to the central character in a first-person narration, it is tough to immerse oneself in the book. Most of the times, I found Joe too much of a whiny jerk to be able to like him. While I get that Joe was struggling emotionally, it somehow felt more because of his self-centred life choices than because of his (possible) depression.

Bookish Nays:

😒 All the relationships in the book, whether romantic or otherwise, seem instantaneous. There is no build-up at all.

😒 Despite Joe’s being a loner, he has had quite a few women in his past. Keeping track of them becomes quite confusing because of Joe’s tendency to go back and forth in his memories, and because of his habit to refer to them by pronouns than by name most of the times.

😒 Some scenes went much beyond my patience level, mainly in terms of character choices. (My threshold for tolerating self-absorbed characters is quite low.)

😒 Minor complaint: Having a Mac and a Matt in the office was confusing. I wish authors would keep character names distinct enough to make things a tad bit easy for us readers.

All in all, the book does have its merits, especially considering that it is a debut work. As a coming-of-age literary fiction with a central character who learns to think beyond himself, it offers a decent experience and a satisfying ending. But the journey towards this finale is ponderous and meandering.

I did try to go with the flow for this unusual work, but the flow ended up too directionless for my liking. As of today, mine is the only negative review for this book, so it is quite clear that this must be a case of a reader-book mismatch. Please read other reviews to make up your mind about this novel. This is a mood read, and will be better read when you want something slow and contemplative.

My thanks to author James Thomas for providing me with a complimentary copy of “My Name Isn't Joe”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.