[ book tip by Amy Brown ] This book was more or less forced onto my by my mother, who enjoys the predictability of authors like Josephine Cox and Maeve Binchy. I guess it isn't *that* bad if you like this kind of novel. I, on the other hand, didn't enjoy it much at all.

The book is about a girl on the run from an abusive, ganster-style boyfriend, who is forced to give up her home town and her son in order for her to remain 'safe'. And her 'friends' also thought it was appropriate to badly betray her at least twice throughout the story in the interests of her safety. It made me want to scream 'the police have a witness protection programme' at the main protagonist at numerous points.

The predictability got to me and I found myself correctly guessing the story's ending before I was even halfway through. A couple of factors made me think that this book had been written in a hurry, firstly because of the sheer number of 'other titles by this author' listed in the front (around 35, which is a fair number considering the youthful looking photo of Cox herself displayed in the back of the book), which makes me think she and her pubishers are mainly about quality and not about quantity. There are also points in the novel where some of the phrasing is a little odd and little mistakes appear such as writing 'common sense' as one word instead of two, something I feel would have been rectified, if approriate time had been given to the editor.

All in all, this book was as I expected it to be. Not very good.

2 stars (I'd give it one and a half, but you can't give half stars and my mother really liked it, so the extra star is for her).

[ book info ] Cox, Josephine : Songbird. (Book language: English) HarperCollins, London,