Which it does, in fact, shortly after it ends. But at times I found myself urging this novel on, waiting vainly for it to take to its wings and soar. The friendship between metropolitan, sophisticated Petra, and Sharon, who stayed behind in Wales, is funny and endearing.
#David cassidy i think love you how to
By the time you figured out how to play the part, the curtain dropped and it was on to the next act"). Of course Pearson can still turn a phrase ("Motherhood was like being in a play and only ever having the lines for the scene you were in at any given moment. A wife is dispensed with so quickly neither the character nor I were quite sure they'd ever been married at all. The novel's most interesting people – Petra's mother, her husband, the school queen bee – vanish without warning. All the major events – deaths and divorces – take place offstage and are simply discussed or reflected on by the characters. Here, the school sections are far too long, and the romance too rushed. In I Don't Know How She Does It, she was simply incapable of writing a dull sentence. Pearson is normally the most engaging and readable of writers. More infuriatingly, Bill in the 1998 section starts typing up as a magazine article the story we have already read in the 1974 section – but this isn't the real problem, which is that the book is just a little slow.
#David cassidy i think love you full
The book is full of odd sections that feel stapled in – there is a music therapy write-up for a character we never encounter and at one point Bill puzzlingly starts complaining about how men never read women's commercial fiction. Mentioning cheesecloth shirts, Corona lemonade and Freeman Hardy Willis, as Pearson does, doesn't feel like much more than a checklist nor is there much sense of how it felt to live through the 90s, which is so well evoked in David Nicholls's recent novel, One Day.Ĭassidy-lovers will adore reliving their feather-cut youth but fans of the passionate, funny, angry, heartbreaking Kate Reddy, of whom I am most assuredly one, may find the quiet Petra Williams a more muted proposition. Writing a coming-of-age novel set in the 1970s is difficult, because the bar is already so high – Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club did a wonderful job on school life then, while Phillip Hensher's The Northern Clemency feels like a 30-year-old found object. The book is half set in 1974, and half in 1998. Twenty-four years later Petra goes to claim her prize, and Petra and Bill's paths cross once more. Bill Finn is the young writer of Cassidy's fan magazine, who sets a quiz that Petra wins. Petra Williams is 13, growing up in Wales with a demanding German mother, trying to get in with the right crowd at school and deep in the throes of her very first pop star crush. But finally, and literally wrapped up in a pretty bow, I Think I Love You, Pearson's ode to David Cassidy and adolescent dreams, has arrived. It took Audrey Niffenegger, author of the similarly world-eating Time Traveler's Wife, six years to write the followup, during which time she couldn't figure out why her publishers kept taking her out to lunch and making pointed remarks about their share price. It is hard for writers not to worry about "second album syndrome", especially when you've already been the voice of a generation. There was talk of her being sued by Harvey Weinstein for non-delivery, and Pearson's touching confession of clinical depression in the pages of the Daily Mail. It's been seven years since the working-mother smash hit, I Don't Know How She Does It. A llison Pearson's new novel has had a troubled gestation, to put it mildly.
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