a b Schaub, Michael (8 January 2006). "Surprise visit upends a family's vacation". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 18 April 2008. The story is told in the third person but with the focus changing from character to character. All the four characters get their turn (or, rather, multiple turns) and all four have things to reveal and things to hide and all four change during the course of the book. Anyway, whatever, they made the story seem too contrived and dull. None of the characters were engaging nor did they warrant any sympathy, empathy or any other kind of pathy. A prime example being Dr Michael Smart, all round nauseating self obsessed academic with a penchant for thinking and talking about himself in the third person and for bedding his students. Note - the two activities need not be mutually exclusive for the tedious Dr Smart. That said, I can vouch that he is a good representative mash-up of many male academics that I have known and not loved.

I read this book partly due my love of Ali Smith (based largely around her Seasonal Quartet) but also due to its setting in Norfolk (for interest the culmination of the Seasonal Quartet is also set in Norfolk – Smith herself living nearby in Cambridge, my University town, which also features in this novel). Ali Smith is a Scottish author, born in Inverness in 1962. [5] She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books. [6] Smith's first book, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995 and praised by critics; it was awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award. [5] Plot [ edit ] Smith's well-honed, even obsessive prose gives a feeling of eavesdropping on her characters' innermost thoughts." - The New Yorker. Ali Smith has yet to disappoint me and I’m so thrilled about that! The Accidental was an absolute joy to read, and with the exception of one tiny chapter (I had the same issue with Hotel World), it was perfection. The chapter in question was written in verse and I don’t get on with poetry. Eve’s head was full of sentences which she’d been practising overnight. Who is to say what authenticity is? Who is to say who owns imagination? Who is to say that my versions, my stories of these individuals’ afterlives, are less true than anyone else’s? She was going to answer every question with a question. This would let her answers seem open, let her seem willing to be discursive, at the same time as be rhetorically cunningly closed."How does Smith capture the angst of early adolescence so vividly in the character of Astrid? What kind of girl is she? What are her most engaging eccentricities? Why does she feel so casually hostile toward the rest of her family? Why is she so captivated by Amber? Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End". Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve's from a previous marriage (to Adam Berenski). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from 'Alhambra' – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest. This is a book for folks who have an appetite for literary experimentation. If you liked Ulysses, you will like this. If you like guessing where dialogue begins and thought ends, you will love this. As for me, I think that punctuation was invented for a reason. Call me pedestrian. I also like some literary experimentation, for example I loved Shadow Tag by Louise Erdich. But Erdich’s book drew me in inexorably and I watched in horror as a relationship imploded. It was a compelling and satisfying work and well worth putting the time into. This one was simply boring and annoying and it alienated me. While the others' complicated lives involve so many lies, Amber refreshingly says and does as she pleases.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. The Accidental explores an interplay of fiction & reality— the Amber chapters/interstices are a clever play on the kind of Genuine series of books Eve Smart has built her reputation on: Shall I drop a hint? Think of Uncle Balt in The Tunnel. The entire Smart family & their experience is a fabrication of a character called Eve because the End gives a spin to everything that came before— Amber has morphed into Eve— a fictional character creating other fictional characters—talk about meta! The twist ending delivers a major po-mo punch. Ratcliffe, Sophie (20 May 2005). "Life in sonnet form". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 18 April 2008.

The Accidental

Each has different preoccupations -- and often is hiding something from the others (though Amber causes much of that to spill out, one way or another).

My favorite character is of course Astrid. She is now one of the fictional characters that I will remember for a long time or maybe remember forever. Smith was able to beautifully capture the eccentricities and intensity of a 12-y/o lost character. Having dinner with his family, Magnus thinks that “Everybody at this table is in broken pieces which won’t go together, pieces which are nothing to do with each other, like they all come from different jigsaws, all muddled together into the one box by some assistant who couldn’t care less in a charity shop or wherever the place is that old jigsaws go to die” [p. 138]. In what ways are Astrid, Eve, Michael, and Magnus broken? What has broken each of them? Why don’t they fit together? This is really hard book to rate. I really enjoyed the writing style and the way the story was told. Ali Smith’s writing style was a little hard to get into at first. She writes in a stream of consciousness style and doesn’t use and punctuation to denote speech. But once I was used to it, it was easy to read. I never got confused as to who was speaking. Eve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she’s her mother’s friend. Son Magnus, age seventeen, thinks she’s an angel.But Amber isn't entirely harmless: she's not only completely independent, she has a destructive bent, and doesn't much care what she leaves in her wake. Completely captivating. . . . Thoroughly charming and melodic. . . .Devilishly lovely.”— The Boston Globe Coming home from their vacation -- once they've rid themselves of Amber -- they are given an opportunity to for a fresh start (a rather startling opportunity -- blank slate fresh, in some (but only some) respects). Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing “thrilling.” Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her “style, ideas, and punch.” Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor. Michael is a professor of English, but his main pursuit appears to be that of his young female students.