When I was asked to review this book by Charlotte Greig, I was excited because it was a novel. I don’t usually read them, and not because I don’t want to but because I have a hard time finding books that aren’t silly “chick lit” but still interesting and non-depressing.  (I do enjoy good literature geared towards women.)  I know, everyone says they can’t stomach the genre and yet it remains so popular, but I genuinely get bored and angry reading female characters who are totally vapid. (Trying to watch the Real Housewives of anything has me foaming at the mouth.)

Here, finally, is a lead female character that has a brain. Susannah is a philosophy student in Sussex, England in 1974, although the 70’s part didn’t play in so heavily that the book felt like it was telling a 35 year old story. There were concrete references to the era – a John Martyn concert in a student center for one, a note that the new, acceptable term for homosexuals is “gay” for another – but the story feels timeless and easy to relate to. Susannah, a sophomore, turns to the major European philosophers of the 19th and 20th centuries to help determine major life decisions, and as a humanist thinker I appreciated reading a book where the first obvious answer was not turning to a higher power. The “crash course” on major philosophers was fascinating, too.

There is romance in the book, but it doesn’t dominate annoyingly, and it’s not all sweetness either.  There is no obvious happy ending looming all throughout the book, and Charlotte Greig does an excellent job of making things not just what I want them to be, but what they must be.  A major theme in the book only debuts in the second half, letting the reader get to know Susannah and her life’s circumstances first so we really feel it when the twisty party comes.

This novel is beautifully written, and I’m very excited to be sharing it with you.  It’s on Amazon here.