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Revision as of 15:56, 29 August 2020
, 15:56, 29 August 2020no edit summary
|pages=496/12h11m
|publisher=Black Swan
|date=February 200112011
|isbn=0552772461
|website=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Atkinson
I guess that most of us have made the odd impulse purchase but Tracy Waterhouse, security chief at the Merrion Centre in Leeds, blew most people's ideas of an impulse purchase out of the water one morning. Seeing a known prostitute dragging a toddler through the shopping mall whilst cursing at her, Waterhouse followed the woman and bought the girl for £3000. The difficulty of a purchase like this is knowing what to do next and Tracy's humdrum life is replaced with one of stress, fear and an overwhelming love for four-year-old Courtney.
She might have thought that the transaction to purchase Courtney went unnoticed, but there were witnesses to what happened. One was Tilly, an aging ageing actress teetering on the edge of dementia, and Jackson Brodie, supposedly in search of someone else's roots, but actually looking for somewhere to live and for the wife who seems to have absconded with most of his money. The money doesn't worry Jackson - it was an unlooked-for inheritance - and if he was honest, he knows that he should never have married Tessa. It's a matter of principle. He should have married Louise - but she's now married to someone else.
I read Kate Atkinson for her exquisite writing. It soothes my brain and makes me smile with delight. I know that there will be laugh-out-loud moments and that the plot will be intricate, constructed much in the way of a complex jigsaw, with every piece being important to the overall picture. I wasn't disappointed. I expected that the first part of the book would require concentration to grasp the full cast of characters and that it was likely that there would be jumps in time, but once you've accommodated all this you'll have people in your mind whom you know as intimately as many of your friends.
If you'd like to read more of Kate Atkinson, her debut was [[Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson|Behind the Scenes at the Museum]]. You could read the Jackson Brodie series in [[Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie Novels in Chronological Order|chronological order]] or as a standalone, but some of the references will make more sense if you've at least read [[When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson|When Will There Be Good News?]]
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