The Saturday Morning Post (No. 25)

This week I came across a series of books while waking through the stacks of the local library, and picked up two of them, An Irish Country Village, and An Irish Country Courtship by Patrick Taylor.

My reviewer criteria.

I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

An Irish Country Village by Patrick Taylor  DNF 10%

This is apparently a series of 17 books, many of them set in the small fictional village of Ballybuckledo in Northern Ireland. The series is set in the late 1960's and concerns a new doctor taking up practice in the village with an older doctor. A patient of the new doctor has died and he must regain the regard of the village. If you imagine All Creatures Great and Small, with doctors instead of vets, set in the 60's instead of the 30's, and in Ireland instead of the North of England, you will know the story format. While I enjoyed All Creatures Great and Small (the old TV show more than the books) this story didn't work for me for several reasons.

The first element was the writing. I can't quite put my finger on it, but it simply didn't click with me. It seemed rather simple, YA-ish almost, not very cohesive, and rather repetitive. And yet, there was this frequent abruptness in the scenes that I often left me briefly lost. The writing just didn't flow. I found that I had to work to read it. Still the spine of the library book did have a sticker with a butterfly on it, that said "Gentle Read" for what that's worth.

Next, the characters seemed unrealistic, again for a reason I couldn't put my finger on. Perhaps because of the writing, and perhaps because this was the second book in the series and I had missed too much. The first book wasn't on the shelf, so there may be an assumption on the part of the author that the reader would know the characters better than I did, starting from where I did. The third thing; it read too much like an All Creatures Great and Small knock off. You have the somewhat outrageous, but wise older doctor and the young, somewhat insecure, new doctor, just trying to work his way into the practice and the local inhabitants. The older doctor struck me too much like Siegfried, at least in the original TV series version of that character. Why settle for a knock off?

And the fourth thing was that the author, a doctor himself, spent too much time describing every little medical treatments, step by step, something that just doesn't interest me at all.

When I have to force myself to read a book, I know that the book isn't for me. And I simply found myself putting it down with no desire to continue reading it at around the 50 page mark of a 500 page book. Lord knows how he strung the story out that long. I won't know.