Your Perfect Year by Charlotte Lucas, Alison Layland (Translator)

First things first, the translator did a pretty good job with this one.  I have studied just enough German to know that their sentence structures and speech patterns do not lend themselves well to translating to English.  This does sometimes show in the dialogue between characters as you can tell something has been lost along the way.  On the whole though the prose has been handled well and you never feel like the translator is overshadowing the author's intention.

My real problem with this was the characters, I just couldn't warm to either Hannah or Jonathan - which is a real problem as the book is split fairly evenly between their two tales.  Of the two Jonathan is the less facile of the two and the one that genuinely goes on a "personal journey".  In the early sections he comes across as old before his time and constrained by his routines; even worse he is paralysed by inactivity.  Hannah however is just downright annoying, she isn't peppy and genuinely life affirming she just needs a good slap as it all feels so fake and forced.

The plot sort of drifts along with no sense of urgency and there is a nasty tendency for tell rather than show to creep in.  Don't tell me how Jonathan feels about his father and his legacy - show me.  That's the real problem with the book rather than narration by our two main characters we have constructed monologues and it did leave me with the sense I was being dictated too rather a chat between friends (and the best books are a dialogue between reader and narrator).

Unfortunately, this felt more like a decade than a year.  It just all takes so long to go anywhere and by the time it does interest had sadly waned.  The story itself is 2 Stars but I popped an extra one in there for the non-distracting translation.