Home Truths
by Freya North
HarperCollins, $160
Freya North no longer needs to concoct her reviews. These days, with her novels regularly in the best-seller lists, they're mostly glowing - just like those she cooked up to send to a literary agent with three chapters of her first novel.
You have to admire her bravado. And it worked. That novel, Sally, was the subject of a bidding war. A decade on, her backlist runs to seven titles. Her latest comes off the presses with 'the new best-seller' already emblazoned on the cover. In it, North reunites her readers with the McCabe sisters - Cat, Fen and Pip - each of whom has been the subject of a previous book, but it works well as a stand-alone.
There's much to be picky about in Home Truths. It's full of proofreading errors, to the extent that at one point each line of a conversation is attributed to the same person, so she appears to be talking to herself (she isn't). Doesn't anybody proofread novels any more? There are continuity glitches, too. How can someone abandoned by her mother 33 years ago, when she was six months old, now be 32?
The sex, despite leaving little to the imagination, is dull - proof that, unlike in pornography, explicitness alone just isn't enough. And if it's all just a little too nice, the nasty bits - and there are some - are smoothed at the edges so our tears dry quickly. Well, who wants to be depressed anyway?