Wednesday 21 October 2015

Book review - April's Busman Holiday, by Kerry Frith



This book is truly awful. It reads as if it had been written by a primary school child, perhaps one in about the fourth grade. In almost every sentence we see an almost total lack of competence in the English language: intransitive 'lay', homophone errors, inverted commas used for emphasis, missing punctuation, it's all there. The writer appears to be almost completely illiterate. The story is told with a naivete that also felt very childish to me.

And yet... there are flashes of something. Just as I'd be almost at the point of chucking it out, there'd be a flash of something that would hint at possibilities as yet unexplored. I think Frith may have talent, and if she ever gains an adult's fluency in the language, just may make a writer. But April's Busman Holiday (even the TITLE has a grammatical error!) was nowhere near ready for publication.

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