Pop

There is something hugely likeable about Kitty Aldridge's account of Maggie, a quietly perceptive 13-year old who ends up living with her grandfather, Pop, in Northern England after the loss of her mother.Already after the first page you get the gist of things to come - metaphor after metaphor after metaphor, which I'm sure breaks every rule of writing there is. But simply by persisting in this extravagance, Aldridge creates a style of her own. The colours, smells, the music and atmosphere of 1970s Northern England all come to intense life in her prose. Sometimes, though, I wish she had got rid of the occasional passage. That would actually have put her lyric and quirky turn of phrase into sharper focus. Some real gems are now almost drowned out by a relentless flow of images.However, the main problem with this book is that it just hasn't got a hook. Even though Aldridge hint at some horrible way that Maggie's mother has died, and though the novel builds up to a pub-quiz duel between Pop and his arch rival, the storylines aren't the backbone of the book. Often, they seem more like excuses for Aldridge to launch into her long descriptive sections. Evocative though these are, a book needs something more than that to be a really great read.