Rosoff and Forna

I read two books about the experience of war recently, Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love. Both books, failed to really impress me. Of the lot I suppose Forna's was better, but clocking in at 445 pages it really wore me out with it's excruciatingly slow pace and lack of dialogue. Rosoff's on the other hand, I blew through in 5 hours.

Both books were critically acclaimed, but I found the hype to be overrated. That and I didn't like the characters at all. Daisy in How I Live Now was overtly precocious in an annoying way, Edmond too self-assured to be a plausible teenager. A whole swathe of characters in The Memory of Love are overly indulgent with their emotions, choosing deliberately to linger on events and feel sad for years after with no actual steps taken to rectify things, the most annoying being Elias Cole who I wanted to strangle at various times.

While not being bad books per se, I found them nonetheless disappointing and unimpressive.