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Perfect Rachel Joyce 9780857520661 Books

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Perfect Rachel Joyce 9780857520661 Books

There are few books on my reading list that I don't want to put down. "Perfect" is one of them. The best way to describe this book is to say that it flows with a 'gentle' tension, and this tension is skilfully kept up throughout. One never knows which direction the story will take, and yet, despite its constant suggestions of going down one track when it always takes another, it all holds together so well (even if the characters don't always hold together mentally - while trying to keep up appearances, under pressure of exposure and blackmail and due to misunderstanding and loneliness). Loved it! A very elegantly written piece of literature.


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Perfect Rachel Joyce 9780857520661 Books Reviews

Once I started reading this book, I couldn't put it down. It touched my heart as few books have done. The characters are so real, I felt I knew them and could feel their pain, their fears, their disappointment in life. The author builds the tension throughout the book, and utilizes the back and forth time sequence to keep us pulling for "Jim," while at the same time we struggle with all of them in the past. It is a remarkable book and I would recommend it to anyone Middle School and older.
Watch (in your minds eye) mental illness flourish and spread. You feel the twist coming but I won't be anything that your expecting. The story is good, the dialogue is believable though unexciting.
As in The Unikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce once again writes of imperfect characters in impossible situations. James and Byron are best chums with parents who live proper lives in proper communities and attend proper private schools. What's missing is loving parents, and in fact, James confesses to Byron that he's not even sure his mother wants him.

They both adore Byron's beautiful mother Diana, the trophy wife of a successful businessman, who sets up his family in a beautiful country estate that he comes to visit on weekends. Diana doesn't share the proper background with the other mums of Byron's school chums but tries hard to fit in. She only mentions her mother to Byron once when she confesses that she was "a mistake." Byron worked hard to earn his mother's approval and to make her happy without receiving any display of affection in return. I couldn't help think it paralleled Donna Tartt's book Goldfinch where a boy's privileged life was also gutted by the loss of his mother and the absence of loving caregivers.

When I realized where the paired chapters were heading I wondered if I wanted to keep reading, but I loved Joyce's previous two books and I trusted her. The selfish "proper" people are balanced by the kind and unique friends that Jim meets who help him rise above his circumstances which is all he ever needed. This book is brilliant.
This book fills you with so much sadness it almost breaks your heart. And yet, in the end, there is some hope and light.

Half of the narrative is written from a child's perspective, which is always deceptive in its simplicity, but which often shows more insight that adult narratives. It always saddens me how parents can screw up their children unknowingly. The English stiff upper lip (taken to exteemes) is a good example of this in this book.

This book is beautifully written and I'm sad to let it go.
I love the way Rachel Joyce uses lyrical language to show you the world she has created, the layers of complexity of the people she is writing about. I read her second book first and it really inspired me to find this one and I was hooked from the start.
Perfect is a beautifully balanced story of a sensitive boy who takes the burden of his family's mistakes and sorrows onto his own shoulders and spends much of his life suffering the consequences. Through the unfolding of the incident that sets him on that path and the events in the period of time some 40 years later, Joyce shows how a person's life can be profoundly affected by the way other people's actions are interpreted and acted upon. The structure of the story itself weaves back and forth between these times until we can see the complete picture - perfectly. Highly recommended.
I would give this book 4.5 stars if I could. It loses half a star because, as others have mentioned, it was slow to hook me and also because I found the dual story lines a bit uneven. (Interestingly, however, I didn't consistently prefer one story over the other. I was initially more intrigued by the two boys and the looming tragedy in their futures, but as the novel progressed, I found myself most invested in the character of Jim and anxious to get back to his present-day tale.)

This book spans forty years, but it focuses on events that occurred during a four month period in 1972 and on the happenings in one character's small life over the course of a few weeks in the present.

The author does a beautiful job capturing a specific moment in time. I was not alive in 1972 and I have never been to England, but I felt as if I was there with Byron as his life derailed. I also appreciated the way the author explores several important topics - social class, gender roles, mental health, and even a bit on racism - through the dual lenses of a boy in the last days of childhood and a survivor of electroshock therapy living with OCD, in a way that feels both natural and affecting without becoming didactic.

As I said, this book was a slow start for me, but in the end, I couldn't put it down until I had finished. It was well worth the time invested, and I have a feeling these characters and their stories will be with me for a long time.

Highly recommended.
There are few books on my reading list that I don't want to put down. "Perfect" is one of them. The best way to describe this book is to say that it flows with a 'gentle' tension, and this tension is skilfully kept up throughout. One never knows which direction the story will take, and yet, despite its constant suggestions of going down one track when it always takes another, it all holds together so well (even if the characters don't always hold together mentally - while trying to keep up appearances, under pressure of exposure and blackmail and due to misunderstanding and loneliness). Loved it! A very elegantly written piece of literature.