Shrines of Gaiety

I'm breaking my tradition of reviewing debut novels because Kate Atkinson has a new novel! She doesn't need more reviews, but then again, this probably isn't a straight-up review.

The next line would be a hidden spoiler on Goodreads, so you've been warned:

She is not afraid to kill them off.

I'll not tell you who, though!

I love Kate Atkinson's witty prose that manages to also be deep and often skirts the edge of sentimentality before she undercuts it. Life and death and everything in between is simultaneously taken seriously and held lightly on gossamer threads.

Skipping over the plot entirely, what interested me as a writer was her use of POV, which rapidly shifts between characters with an omniscient telling interjected, sometimes just before the reader is given the crucial information by a character. While this would be torn to shreds by anyone following writing rules, she's Kate Atkinson, so who's going to argue with success? Most-to-all of us couldn't do that, certainly not with our first novels. (She did.) I think it largely works here, although there were characters I wanted to be with more (Gwen, Freda, Frobisher), and a few I could have done with less or none (Ramsey, looking at you).

As always, her characters and setting embody the time period seamlessly. I thought more than once about the German series, Babylon Berlin (which should have had more seasons, but that's another story).