i haven't quite finished complaining though -

(what colour should sarah and michael be, if they had been named for colours?)

i found it hard to get into initially. this is because the whole thing is told by each of the casson children in turn, and it began with rose, whose writing i find i do not really enjoy. (surprising, considering how good her letters to bill were.) also i find myself flatly uninterested in her school life, which takes up too much of the narrative.

after we switched to indigo's narrative (45 pages in) i began enjoying the book much more, although for four first person narratives they all sounded identical. i think the book really loses something by being written this way. in general i don't even really like novels to be told through changing first person narratives - very few of them are done well, and you have to be a very good ventriloquist, and mckay really isn't. she would have done much better if she kept to third person omniscient, as in the earlier books, not only because the voices are off, but because the book loses the detached insight of the earlier books. also, all this changing focalisation and unreliable narrator business needs to create a more complex and layered sort of narrative; it has to do more than just advance an uncomplicated narrative in stages. also the frame really doesn't work.