Lydia Ruffles

I didn’t really take to the main character, Lux, in this book. One thing I can say, though, is that Ruffles is an extraordinary writer. She writes very intelligently and articulately. But that rather-too-adult intelligence and articulateness didn’t give credibility to eighteen/nineteen-year-old Lux, the narrator of the story. I would have been more comfortable with this in third person POV.

Lux, a (female) student at the Richdeane art school (for rich privileged teenagers), goes to a party and wakes up in hospital with an arm injury and no recollection at all of how she got there. As she spends most of her recreational time getting drunk and getting high, there's probably an obvious explanation for her blacking out and therefore not remembering how she got there. I never expected what actually landed Lux in hospital, and I enjoyed that element of surprise, but it still didn’t endear me to this character, who, despite her trauma, remained rude, ungrateful and simply not very nice at all. It was very hard to engage with her. If that was Ruffles' intention, then job done. If not, it's a misfire.

The truth is revealed at about twenty-five percent from the end, and the story just goes a bit flat after that…three quarters of it seemed rather incongruous.

I liked the writing but the main character not so much.… (mehr)