being ill is expensive! £14.40p and a chest infection - lets hope this medication works!
being ill is expensive! £14.40p and a chest infection - lets hope this medication works!
Member since:25.02.2007
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Martina Cole - The Business…..
**The Book**
Martina Cole's latest novel entitled "The Business" is yet another book filled with the gritty, hard hitting seediness that is the London underworld. We go back in time to the late 70's and meet the Dooley family. Gerald Dooley SNR, head of the house, Mary Dooley the mother of three children, two sons and a daughter, Imelda. Imelda is the main charter throughout the book as we follow her life, which is bad from start to finish.
Imelda is trouble with a capital "T" and this is something that her family are soon to realise. Her sexually loose behaviour soon gets her with "a belly full of arms and legs" as Martina Cole so eloquently puts it, and this causes major friction within the family. Her father, Gerald SNR, cannot believe that his young and angelic daughter is already giving herself away to all and sundry and cannot hide his rage from anyone. Imelda soon comes up with a story that will get her out of trouble but put a lot of other
people in far worse danger than she herself was in. Telling her father that the very boy she was sleeping with had indeed raped her seemed like a fool proof plan but when her father confronts the up and coming womaniser he gets far more than he bargained for when a knife cuts his life short. Imelda has already caused so much pain with this one lie but the hurt continues as the baby's father is quickly taken out of the picture by Gerald SNR's partner in crime. The trouble is only beginning for Imelda and her family however as the baby is born into a world of drugs and abuse. The life of Imelda Dooley is a long and hate filled one and the only thing she truly cares about is getting her next fix.
**My View**
I have been an avid reader of Martina Cole for many years but have found her books of late rather lacking. I purchased this with the thought that maybe things have turned around and I would enjoy it more than I have the last three books of hers. Unfortunately this was not the case. I struggled through the 400 plus pages that this book has in hardback and have sore wrists from reading in bed under the weight of the thing but feel like I have wasted a few weeks reading the novel itself. Martina Cole's older books seem to have more things actually going on in them or even are centred around a big focal point of the book and I really didn't felt that this book had anything like that. The book seemed to merely follow a troubled young girl turning in to a troubled young women and this did not hold the same interest for me as say her book "Maura's Game".
Something that I also found really annoying was the fact that Martina Cole would reiterate things to the extreme. I noted that pages were taken up on describing things but not in any different manners rather just in different words. Things like "she was pregnant" would also have "she had a belly full of arms and legs" along with "a bun in the oven was not what she wanted". All this just felt like a lot of page filling to me and I felt that the book just needed to get a move on rather than keep covering old ground. I don't think I really disliked the book as I did read up until the end I just found it somewhat lacking in a real page turning storyline. I usually speed through books but this one just seemed to take forever. I often found myself reading but thinking of other things, which if a book is good enough I would not usually do which, is how I know this one was not that gripping.
This book has been on the shelves for a little over a month now in hardback format and I have just finished reading it. I paid £9 something from Tesco's which is said to be half price but I find that this price is pretty much a standard most places. I think as I thought last time I bought a hardback Martina Cole, that I should have waited for it to come out in paperback and that is perhaps what I shall do next time. I don't rate the book highly but it was readable. A 3 star rating is a generous score for this book and I would say if you can get it paperback second hand then do that. It certainly isn't worth paying out for it in hardback. The style of Martina is still the same with the usual harsh language and a fairly nasty theme to it so I wouldn't recommend it to the faint hearted.
It is a shame that Martina Cole's books appear to be deteriorating with each one but as it stands I will continue to read her books until the get really bad. I would hate to think someone would be put of from reading her books if perhaps they were introduced to her books by reading this one. If you have not read a Cole book before then certainly starting from her earliest books is advisable. This book is certainly not a Cole classic but worth a look so I am giving a SLIGHTLY RECOMMENDATION along with the 3 stars. A fairly undecided rating for a pretty undecided book.
I hope this has been of some interest to you.
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A tale of drugs prostitution and a young girl's fight for survival - against all the odds ... more
Imelda Dooley is scared. Really scared. She's played hard and fast and now she's been caught. She's pregnant and now she's on her own. Her father not a man to m...
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