Orkney Twilight

My partner kept telling me that this only had two stars on StoryGraph while I was reading it (actually it’s 2.93 and that should go up when I add my rating). I’d rather start reading a book and see if it keeps my interest rather than rely on other people’s opinions though. This was an ebook from the library and I reject plenty of library books after a few pages so I didn’t think this one was that bad. There was a point where it dragged a bit and I thought the pacing was a bit off but I mostly enjoyed it.

The story is narrated by Sam, the eighteen year old daughter of Jim, who is an undercover policeman. It’s 1984, the miner’s strike is in progress in the background and Sam is a fledgling political activist who has visited the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common and isn’t sure if strange happenings around her are due to her own actions or something to do with her Dad. I really got on with Sam and enjoyed the character. The author points out in the afterword that women rarely get to be political in novels and she felt this was an important character to write. And I agree with her. And the author’s written a lot of this from her own personal experience as well. There were times when I thought I’d found anachronisms but a bit of research later she was right and I was wrong. That was good.

Sam and her Dad and her budding journalist friend Tom head off to Orkney on holiday, and the plot is definitely a bit weak in places. Orkney was a nice setting but it seemed pretty much irrelevant to most of the story, not really a problem. It’s a spy story and not that much of a thriller, I enjoyed the characters more than the plot which might account for the bad ratings the book gets. A lot of the reviews I looked at seem to have expected the book to be a different kind of book than it is. There’s definitely something to be said for just picking up a book and reading it and seeing if you like it rather than looking for something specific! It probably gets something between three and four stars from me, nothing brilliant but for the most part perfectly entertaining and readable. I see the sequel to it is on the library app and I’ll probably try that soon (if they don’t whip it away, books seem to be short lived on there.)