The book that's not for children and who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

I finished reading this recently:

This book was, for the most part, dull. There are 17,000 characters intricately involved with each other - kind of like Love Actually based in 1895. The Children's Book is indeed a page turner. A page-turner in the sense that I regularly turned ahead a few pages to see when the scene would end. It got better towards the two-thirds mark, which, in a book of 600 pages, requires some staying power. My staying power was that I had paid for this book and not borrowed it from the library, which is how I usually acquire my literary material.

What attracted me to this book was the cover (I'm ashamed to say it, but I am extremely shallow in the book cover department. If it has a colourful sketch of a twenty-something 'careergirl' alongside either a handbag or a lipstick, move along please), and also the fact that it was recommended as a 'read of the year' on the TV Book Club. I should have realised as soon as I saw the panelists: Gok Wan was one.

This book was not riveting, even though it includes horrific themes such as father/daughter pornographic pottery, and children being brought up in a house so bohemian they don't even know who their mother is out of their 'mother' and maiden aunt. Same father.

Some parts were just infuriating: in particular, long, boring scenes describing in detail a puppet show. All the action happens in the last third, so for this reason I would not reccommend The Children's Book.

I have just started reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, currently #2 on WH Smith's fiction chart. The Times promises it to be "the most gripping book you will ever read". 70 pages in I am not convinced, but I'm looking forward to it. It's (no prizes for guessing) historical fiction, but this time based on the Tudors. I'm not the biggest Tudor fan, but seeing as a few months ago I visited Hampton Court and really enjoyed it, now I have something visual to work with. Wolf Hall is an unofficial, jazzed-up biography of Thomas Cromwell, King Henry VIII's right hand man.


I'm sure you can't wait for the review of this beast.