Thursday, July 26, 2012

'Other People's Diaries' by Kathy Webb

Alice Day is a washed-up writer who was once well-known and famous from her one and only book titled 'Her Life My Life'.  But that was a decade ago; and since then, she has gotten married, had children and settled into the humdrum of domestic life.  But she wants to write again and get back into being known again.  
So, after working at a local bookstore in Brisbane for a few weeks, she finds that the people who frequent its cafe are not happy.  It's not the service or the books they're not happy about; it's their lives.  This gets her thinking about how much our lives have changed and she begins looking through her Grandmother's belongings and listening to her cassette tapes - the same ones which inspired her first book - and Alice is yet again inspired to write.  This time, it's not about herself, or her family or anything like that - this time, she wants to help other people by changing the small things in their lives which will impact on the bigger things in a positive way.  But will this project work?

I have another book by Kathy Webb, however it's under two different names; and I didn't know it was her until I saw what other books she had written in the front of this one - 'Inheriting Jack' - and so I thought that this book would be a good one to get into as a light one between The Dark Tower books.  But I have found it goes around in circles a fair bit and hit on more of the same characters instead of all of them evenly.  I found it very confusing and couldn't tell which character was which after a while - and I'm not yet halfway through it - and this is a worry when it's a book like this.
I've tried looking for an official website about Kathy Webb, but have only tracked down one other book review about this book which informs us that Kathy Webb and Kris Wilson are sisters who work from different parts of the world to write books together; and this book is their third book.  Until my next post, happy reading.

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