Another delightful novel from Kate Atkinson | When Will There Be Good News?: A Novel

(4.5) "Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty." | When Will There Be Good News?: A Novel | Kate Atkinson

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	• When Will There Be Good News?: A Novel Kate Atkinson Little, Brown and Company, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An absolute pleasure to read - Loved it!

WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? (Pol Proc-Jackson Brodie-England-Cont) - Ex
Atkinson, Kate - 3rd in Jackson Brodie series
Doubleday, 2008, UK Hardcover - ISBN: 9780385608015

First Sentence: The heat rising up from the tarmac seemed to get trapped between the thick hedges that towered above their heads like battlements.

Dr. Joanna Hunter (nee' Mason) is the only survivor of an attack that killed her mother, sister and brother. Now, thirty years later, the man responsible has been released from prison. Ex-detective Jackson Brodie, the one to find young Joanna after the attack, is traveling by train when it derails. Sixteen-year-old Reggie, although she looks to be only 12 but has an old soul, is a mother's help for Joanna's baby, Gabriel, and is being tutored by Ms. MacDonald in exchange for errands. Ms. MacDonald's property backs onto a railway line. The lives of these four people intersect in a completely unexpected manner.

What an unusual and wonderful book! The plot is not always easy to follow, nor is it always easy to keep the characters straight, but it has some of the best dialogue I've ever read and philosophical insights that made me pause. It had a captivating beginning where I was drawn into the sights, smells and sounds only to be followed by the terror and regret of the scene.

The main characters were wonderful and fully-developed through the course of the story. Reggie--"...Reggie's life was like the Ilian plain, littered with the dead."--, in particular, is an absolute marvel and I really thought of this as her story to the point where I didn't want it to end and I do want to know what happens to her in the future. She became just that real.

The author provides an excellent sense of place, but it is absolutely the characters that drive this story. There are a lot of coincidences--"A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen."--but they play into the story and life is full of coincidences.

This book is not for everyone; some might find the style confusing or slow. On one hand, I would not want to be a character in this story as there are more dead people surrounding the characters than I believe I've ever read. On the other there were times I laughed out loud, mainly due to the author's wonderful dialogue. It's of the level where you want to read it aloud to others. I do wish I had learned Latin, but the internet is very useful.

I've not read the previous two books in this series and felt no lack of them for knowing the characters or plot in this book, but I certainly do want to go back and read them for the pure joy of indulging in Ms. Atkinson's writing.

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Another delightful novel from Kate Atkinson

Shana's Review:

When Will There Be Good News? is nothing short of a delightful read. Atkinson gives us a sumptuous combination of wonderful well-developed characters, an engaging plot line, and the prose that I am quickly coming to expect of her - clean, subtle, and smart.

The novel is narrated alternately and in the third person by Jackson Brodie, Reggie Chase, and Louise Monroe. I quickly fell in love with all three. Incidentally, I have not read Atkinson's previous two novels featuring Jackson Brodie and did not feel this hindered my enjoyment of the story in any way.

Atkinson's skill as a writer shows in the adept way in which she ties disparate characters and story lines together. In the beginning, I couldn't fathom how this would happen, but when it did, I was amazed at how right it felt.

I would categorize When Will There Be Good News? as literary suspense. There were several questions that were not answered until the end. What is most amazing about Atkinson is that she gives us an intricately woven story but it doesn't feel complicated. Everything seems very ordinary, yet lovely, and brilliant, and even comic. I love that Atkinson's books are sprinkled with words that are unique to 'British English,' but not overly so.

Very rarely do I read a book that makes me want to buy up all an author's previous novels and devour them as soon as possible, but Kate Atkinson is quickly becoming this author to me. First, I was wowed by Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and now When Will There Be Good News? has completely captivated me and taken my adoration of this author up yet another notch.

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(4.5) "Love was ferocious, love knew how to play dirty."

"Run, Joanna. Run." So begins this riveting novel, a small girl witness to a harrowing crime that, thirty years later, once more intrudes upon the security of an innocent victim who has remade the past into a sustainable present. On a jagged trajectory, a convicted criminal is released, a former cop accidentally detours into Edinburgh, a train crash and a rendezvous with fate and a sixteen-year-old mother's helper clings desperately to the only "family" she has left. Atkinson threads lives together in a complicated pattern, a multi-colored skein that winds through connecting stories, each critical to the whole. Seemingly compartmentalized, in time the random associations prove cleverly orchestrated, one with another, from Dr. Jo Hunter and her helper, Reggie, to Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe and Jackson Brodie (from a previous novel, One Good Turn), even the incarcerated Andrew Decker, released after thirty years, his intentions for the future a cipher.

The author's unusual talent perfectly lends itself to a style of assembled perspectives, each protagonist caught up in personal circumstances, yet all routed to a final denouement. Atkinson is a facile puppet master, moving her pawns purposefully toward the final confrontation, as devastating as the opening chapter of the novel. The characters are wonderfully human, plagued with self-doubts and festering fears, most touched by the untimely, sometimes violent death of loved ones. For all the brisk application to the business of living, the shadowed ghosts of lost loved ones hover significantly, reminding us of the precious moments too often forgotten or left unsavored. This juxtaposition of life and death creates the exquisite tension that drives the story, the threat waiting in the wings for a random cue. A technique that sometimes irritated me in One Good Turn lends this tale a fragmented urgency.

There is class-consciousness coexisting with professionalism, the security of material goods and the paucity of poverty, all of it irrelevant in the face of death, the great leveler.
Still Reggie and Dr. Hunter are at the heart of all, the girl clinging to her employer and chubby baby as family in a hard world, Jo Hunter creating a safe place far from her traumatic childhood but is delivered into danger by the actions of a foolish man. That violence should interfere with best laid plans is the nature of Atkinson's novel: expect the unexpected, a litany of "the wrong person at the wrong place at the wrong time". DCI Monroe is another study in character, a bundle of contradictions between her obsession with "my ladies" (her crime case victims) and the certainly that she is a Bad Wife. Sampling bits of these odd pairings throughout the novel, the author blends them into seamless whole; even when the plot stretches unbelievably, it is engaging and compelling. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

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"Coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen."

(4.5 stars) Not a traditional mystery, Kate Atkinson's third Jackson Brodie novel grows instead out of the terrible traumas that children and young people must endure when people they love die violently. So marked are they by their sudden tragedies, that they never really escape their pasts, and spend the rest of their lives wondering "when will there be good news." Five separate plot lines evolve and begin to overlap here, and in each of these plots the main characters are all needy people hiding an inner loneliness from which they would like to escape. In the first plot, Joanna Mason Hunter is a physician living in Edinburgh, the happily married mother of a one-year-old, a woman who appears to have it all, but thirty years ago, she escaped a slashing attack which murdered her mother, sister, and baby brother. Though she seems to have put her past to rest, the murderer of her family is about to be released from jail.

Joanna's "mother's help" is Reggie Chase, a sixteen-year-old fending for herself in a rundown apartment that she shares with her delinquent brother. Reggie adores her job--and Joanna, who has no idea that Reggie's mother has died traumatically over a year ago. Jackson Brodie, a former police detective and a lead character in Case Histories: A Novel and One Good Turn: A Jolly Murder Mystery, is newly married for the third time, estranged from his twelve-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and prohibited from seeing the two-year-old he believes to be his son with his former girlfriend.

While working on a case in England, Brodie takes the wrong train and ends up in Edinburgh, where a crash near the house occupied by babysitter Reggie Chase brings Reggie and Brodie into contact. Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, a former girlfriend of Jackson Brodie, has also come to Edinburgh, to warn Joanna that the killer of her family has been released. In a final subplot, Joanna's husband Neil Hunter is in debt and in trouble with criminals, and Reggie, the babysitter, has found the house empty when she arrived to babysit. She is convinced that Joanna and the baby are missing and probably dead.

Atkinson's narrative is enhanced by her skillful pacing as she introduces new elements and surprises, and she is especially adept at individualizing her characters. Through flashbacks, she compares and contrasts their past and present lives, and the reader comes to "know" them. Connected thematically by their yearning for loving relationships, they are eventually connected through the plot's complications and mysteries. Ironies abound, and mistaken identities create some bizarre and sometimes darkly humorous scenes. Coincidence plays an important role in resolving the novel in dramatic fashion, and though no one will believe that these twists and turns are remotely realistic, they are great fun and completely consistent with the ebullient story-telling that Atkinson has made her signature. n Mary Whipple

Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel
Human Croquet: A Novel
Emotionally Weird: A Novel
Not the End of the World
Abandonment

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Review

When Joanna Mason was six years old she witnesses an act so horrendous that no little girl should ever have to see. Joanna was the sole survivor of her family. Her mother, sister and brother were all murdered. Now thirty years later, the man who took Joanna's family from her has been released from prison.

Reggie is the nanny for Dr. Hunter. Reggie and Dr. Hunter have a really good relationship, so when one day Dr. Hunter disappears, Reggie worries but it seems that Reggie is the only one that is concerned about Dr. Hunter.

Then there is Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, she is on a mission to locate a missing person. Louise Monroe did not expect to see Jackson Brodie, a longtime friend. It seems Jackson Brodie has a mission of his own to accomplish. Before he can complete it, Brodie has a fatal accident.

There was a good connection with the characters, which helped me to stay interested in this book till the end. When Will There Be Good News? is the third book in this series to feature Jackson Brodie. I have to admit that When Will There Be Good News? is the first book Jackson Brodie book I have read. I thought it was a well-written novel. This story can also be read as a stand alone book. Kate Atkinson added some nice twists in the story line at just the right times. This story had a lot of depth in it. The lesson learned was that you may have made many mistakes in your life but when you are handed a second chance in live it is about how you make the most of it that really counts. For anyone who is looking for a change of pace in their everyday typical reading should give Kate Atkinson a try.

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On a hot summer day, Joanna Mason's family slowly wanders home along a country lane. A moment later, Joanna's life is changed forever...
On a dark night thirty years later, ex-detective Jackson Brodie finds himself on a train that is both crowded and late. Lost in his thoughts, he suddenly hears a shocking sound...
At the end of a long day, 16-year-old Reggie is looking forward to watching a little TV. Then a terrifying noise shatters her peaceful evening. Luckily, Reggie makes it a point to be prepared for an emergency...
These three lives come together in unexpected and deeply thrilling ways in the latest novel from Kate Atkinson, the critically acclaimed author who Harlan Coben calls "an absolute must-read."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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