Siobhán Mc Laughlin's Reviews > How to Stop Time

This book was so bad it actually did stop time for me - stopped time on my reading, bigtime. I've been trying to finish it for the past three weeks or more...! Just the thought of picking it up was too much. (Just as there are some books you can't put down - there are books you can't bloody pick up - and this, for me, was one of them.)

Honestly. What a farce. Sorry Matt Haig. I do enjoy your writing. But I should have known better after reading 'The Humans.' Although I loved the idea of it, I was underwhelmed by its poor narrative. But this was something else entirely. After just one paragraph my attention would wander. All that telling and no showing. (Show don't tell! - the most basic rule of writing...!)

The first problem was the characters. I couldn't care less about the characters - because they weren't characterized that much, just puppets in a poorly realised show. And with the narrator coming across as unlikable and unremarkable (unusual for someone who has lived over 400 years...), not to mention self-involved, moany, bland and boring - it's pretty hard to care.

The story. Well. If there's one thing I can't stand about bad writing, it's the fact that there is no story, rather a pretence of a story, a thin wispy veil that acts as a vehicle for the author's abundant sentimentalities. The thing I most disliked about this novel was the many regurgitated cliches about life and Time rehashed in a plot that is as flat as a steamrolled chicken. At times, I felt I was reading the author's Twitter feed condensed into prose!

There are so many unique things that could have been done with the cool premise that all the blurbs of this book promise. But sadly, they weren't. I don't think I've ever read anything as deflating, anything that elicited a 'wait, that's it?' reaction. And the clip-clopping, staccato stuttering chapters from the present to the past, marked so awkwardly by 'Oooh I feel a memory coming on,' were just so cumbersome, cringe-worthy and just tired.

And to add insult to injury - the curveball chapters of meeting Shakespeare and F Scott Fitzgerald (!!), just parachuted in from nowhere, stretched the bar just a bit too far. That's what you get when the author is telling the story I suppose, and not the narrator. Which was how this novel came across to me. I'm sorry, I don't want to sound like a hater, but when writing a novel, you make sure you leave yourself out of it (!). A true writer surrenders everything to story. A bad writer surrenders story to everything else - the sentimental motives, personal creeds and other concerns that unfortunately blot out the vitals of fiction. This is what this novel feels like.

Was tempted so many times to give it up. It was only the thought of venting my frustration here that kept me going to the end...!

I really couldn't stand this book. And I wanted to like it so much... Disappointing!!!