As a bookseller, I am similarly unhappy. Tea Obreht's publishers, amusingly enough, noticed that the Orange Prize would be announced on the 8th and decided not to print The Tiger's Wife in paperback until the 13th, so we have no copies in the store and no way of getting them. If I had taken the precaution of painting WE HAVE NO TIGER'S WIFE HERE, COME BACK NEXT WEEK on my forehead this morning, today would have been about 75% easier to handle.
But anyway, onto today's book review, which has nothing in common with The Tiger's Wife at all, since it is mainly concerned with time travel, H G Wells and giant robots from the future.
The Map of Time, in proof copy form, has been sitting on my floor since, I think, February, just languishing away at the bottom of my to-read pile. Every time I got to the point of picking it up, I ended up being repulsed, and if you look directly left you will see why.This, I think you'll have to agree, is an utter turd of a front cover, simultaneously evocative of Twilight, a wasting disease and MS Paint. It is vomitous. I kept hoping that the actual book would miraculously not look like this, but the trade paperbacks came into the shop yesterday, and alas, they look just as bad as my proof. I can't even imagine which market the publishers thought they were going to reach out to with this - people who cannot see? The deranged? People who wished that Twilight was more robotic than it already is?
So anyway, although chronically repulsed by the cover, I finally decided to read the first chapter to check if it really was as bad as it looked - and the first chapter turned out to be all about a young aristocrat, tragically in love with Jack the Ripper's final victim. Ahah! I thought. This IS terrible! This is incredibly stupid! This writing is totally clunky! I'll just read one more chapter to make sure it keeps on being ridiculous, and then I'll stop.
And then I finished the book.
