2020/057: Big Sky -- Kate Atkinson
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020 06:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tamaranth2020/057: Big Sky -- Kate Atkinson
I've enjoyed Atkinson's previous Jackson Brodie novels, though not as much as I've enjoyed her other work (see various reviews here): Big Sky, however, left me cold. Jackson Brodie -- sharing custody of his teenage son with Julia, carrying out run-of-the-mill investigations in Yorkshire, starting to feel as though he may be past his best -- is peripheral to the main stories here, which are definitely in 'lost girls' territory. There is the lingering rumour of a third man involved in a historical paedophile ring; there is the lucrative Exotic Travel, which is more of an import business; there is a child getting into a car, observed by Brodie, whose instincts tell him something is wrong.
There are some splendid women here, notably Crystal, who has remade her life after a shaky start and is now the wife of a successful businessman, raising her daughter to want for nothing. She's tacky and superficial, in some respects: but she has an iron will.
Big Sky redeems itself, in part, by a denouement that involves true justice rather than literal facts: but the theme was so grim, and Jackson's middle-agedness so hopeless, that even a week after reading I am happy to have forgotten most of the details of the plot.
He’d been out of the real business of detecting for too long. Entrapping unfaithful boyfriends and husbands wasn’t dealing with criminals, just high-functioning morons. [loc. 2408]
I've enjoyed Atkinson's previous Jackson Brodie novels, though not as much as I've enjoyed her other work (see various reviews here): Big Sky, however, left me cold. Jackson Brodie -- sharing custody of his teenage son with Julia, carrying out run-of-the-mill investigations in Yorkshire, starting to feel as though he may be past his best -- is peripheral to the main stories here, which are definitely in 'lost girls' territory. There is the lingering rumour of a third man involved in a historical paedophile ring; there is the lucrative Exotic Travel, which is more of an import business; there is a child getting into a car, observed by Brodie, whose instincts tell him something is wrong.
There are some splendid women here, notably Crystal, who has remade her life after a shaky start and is now the wife of a successful businessman, raising her daughter to want for nothing. She's tacky and superficial, in some respects: but she has an iron will.
Big Sky redeems itself, in part, by a denouement that involves true justice rather than literal facts: but the theme was so grim, and Jackson's middle-agedness so hopeless, that even a week after reading I am happy to have forgotten most of the details of the plot.
