Page Turners – January 2023 review

To damn with faint praise, no one really disliked our January ‘page turner’, The Birdcage by Eve Chase.  One member did not finish the book as she had something more engrossing to read and one said she enjoyed it.

The general feeling in the group was that the thin story was too drawn out, long-winded, tedious, repetitive and frustrating in that hints and clues were dropped but then cut off abruptly.  Also frustrating for one member was that people did not talk to each other, although she did rather like the characters:  three half-sisters drawn back to their grandparents’ home in Cornwall by their louche artist father twenty years after a terrible unnamed event on the day of the eclipse when a fourth girl, who was later revealed to be another half-sister, was also present.

The location of the large Victorian villa on the North Cornwall coast was thought engaging and well described, but the characters were in general found to be more caricatures or representative types and insufficiently interesting to care about, relate to or engage with.  There was some tension and jeopardy in the story, and their was an interesting narrative device in the use of the first person for the chapters looking back in time, but no one was surprised by the eventual revelations.

Natalie Brophy