What: Kate Atkinson's second novel, Human Croquet, is told from the point of view of Isobel Fairfax. She has just turned sixteen, and she lives with her bad-tempered aunt, her stunted brother, her sporadically present father, her father's very dim new wife, and the inescapable loss of her missing mother. Coming-of-age is one thing, but Isobel also occasionally gets caught in time pockets to the late 16th century, where parallel events are occurring.
Comparable to: In some ways quite similar to Jostein Gaarder's The Solitaire Mystery.
Representative quote: "I awake from an unpleasant dream in which I found myself walking up a hill, a Jack-less Jill, to fill a bucket of water from a well at the top. As we know, trips to the well are fraught with the danger of alien kidnapping, so my dreaming self was quite relieved to find it still existed when it got to the top."
You might not like it if: You get muddled by the switches from reality to surreality and you don't think the muddled feeling is at all pleasant.
How to get it: Buy it or borrow it from your library.
Connections to previous Wreckage: Kate Atkinson went on to write, among other things, four (so far) novels featuring Jackson Brodie. The first two are Case Histories (Rec. #3) and One Good Turn (Rec. #69).
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