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Loading... Something Might Happen (2003)by Julie Myerson
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This book follows Tess and her family after the murder of her friend Lennie in a seaside town in the south east of Englnd. I found it to be a book that really draws you in and definitely made me feel that Tess was experiencing grief in a way that made sense to me. I found it difficult to put down. Even though it has the elements of a thriller it's certainly not of that genre and is much more about people and life and how it affects us when awful events happen that we are not prepared for. I found it quite emotional at the end, but also quite positive. I would definitely recommend it to those that enjoy really entering into other peoples lives and feeling those experiences. Review here: http://bookannelid.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/something-might-happen-by-julie-myer... no reviews | add a review
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On a Monday night in October in a small seaside town in Suffolk, a woman is brutally murdered. Her name is Lennie and, thinks her best friend Tess, she is not the type to have something happen to her. Something Might Happen is not a murder mystery. There are clues, false trails, detectives, all the paraphernalia of the whodunnit, but Myerson's concern is with the effect of the murder on an ordinary community and specifically on Tess herself, her husband Mick and her three children. As the police go about their routine investigation, Tess's world of nappies, Elastoplast and fish fingers begins to unravel. Suddenly nothing is certain, the mundane becomes charged with significance, established relationships begin to crumble and places that once were safe are safe no longer. This is a novel of extraordinary skilfulness and almost unbearable tension. Julie Myerson creates a world that is recognizable in every detail, so that when it begins to fracture we feel as if it were our own lives that are under threat. No library descriptions found.
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As far as the story is concerned, it had me in tears by the end, but it was mainly the bits about the children that got me going. The grisly murder at the beginning left me oddly cold, as we don't really know the victim. Same went for the other adults in the story - they remained largely flat and had little to distinguish them from one another, whilst the children were drawn with tremendous skill.
A lot of plot elements felt needless - in the way that horror stories have gratuitous gore, this seemed to introduce gratuitous misery, but you would have to be made of stone not to be moved by it.
I would read more by this author but pleeeeease can we have some speech marks. I know the brain can compensate, but just as I could probably do the washing up with a blindfold on, all things being equal I would prefer not to. ( )