The Adults by Caroline Hulse

2.5 Stars

This is touted as being a humourous book, sorry but I found little humour between these pages - maybe it slipped past me but I really couldn't find it.  There were scenes which made you squirm uncomfortably in your seat, I wonder if these were supposed to be where the humour lay?

I did enjoy the plot of the tale though - the idea behind a divorced couple spending Christmas together with their respective partners all for the sake of their young daughter was a good one.  Unfortunately the author ruined it slightly by having them share a cabin in the holiday village they go to (any resemblance to a popular chain starting with Centre and ending in Parcs is entirely coincidental *coughs*).  This stretched the bounds of believability uncomfortably for me.

The main characters we see things from are the two women concerned - Claire and Alex with a goodly dollop of Patrick thrown in, Matt is pretty much an occasional character unless Alex is thinking about him.  Unfortunately their voices aren't sufficiently different to really tell them apart on the page so it all becomes a bit of a mish mash on the page.

The denouement is flagged early on with the insertion of transcripts of police interviews following "the incident".  The only thing we don't really know is what happened in the field and when we do find out the story they concoct for the police is laughable and does not hold water at all.  It definitely wouldn't wash in the real world but as this is a work of fiction they seemingly get away with it.

The writing has a good pace to it and the author does seem to have a pretty good grasp of relationships and how people work on an internal level.  Fortunately this was enough to keep me reading even though the story itself was not actually that good.