Catherine Forde

I have to admit, my heart sank when I received Sugarcoated as my first book to review through the Library Thing review programme as this is really not the kind of thing I would normally read - lets just say that as a guy in his early thirties I am not the target audience - I must have clicked the wrong button!

The story centres around Cloddy, a teenage girl who is overweight and unpopular at school. She spends most of her weekends working for her Dad in the Opticians, until one day there she witnesses a violent attack. Then she meets 'the man of her dreams' - two events that will change her life forever.

My first impressions were that this was a debut novel, relatively amateurish chick lit / teenage fiction with pretensions of being dark and edgy. Reading the novel did nothing to change this, other than to note with interest that Forde has actually already carved out a niche for herself with similar titles and has had some previous success in the young adult genre.

It's biggest setback for me was an unsympathetic and unbelievable protagonist. I've taught teenagers for a living, and none of them were ever that gullible, stupid, or unaware of how the world works. It's funny that a book that starts in an Opticians should end with a 'shock ending' that everyone but the main character should see coming without the need for glasses.

Please take my comments about this novel with a pinch of salt or a spoonful of sugar, as I'm really not the person the book is aimed at, and I'm sure that younger readers and fans of the genre would enjoy it. It's a reasonably fast-paced thriller, and will no doubt appeal to the target market.… (mehr)

Jimmy Kelly's transformation from slovenly, miserable fat kid to talented and confident swimmer is a heartening journey for readers.

*SPOILER* Fourteen-year-old Jimmy Kelly is slovenly and fat. He is
teased and bullied constantly at school, not only by classmates but his PE teacher as well. His refuge from the cruelty is, ironically, gourmet cooking. Jimmy knows how to cook and he enjoys creating meals and "tablet" (a type of candy) for his Mum and Aunt Pol. Father "GI Joe" learns Jimmy's secret and wants him to cater the swimathon fundraiser. In exchange, Jimmy gets swimming lessons from GI Joe. Jimmy proves to be a natural talent in the pool. He drops 21 pounds and is growing in confidence, even gaining a sort of girlfriend in Ellie McPherson. But Mum and Aunt Pol drop a bomb, revealing a family secret and Jimmy's real parentage.
… (mehr)

A repost of an earlier review which was accidentally deleted:

I received Sugarcoated on 17 April and started reading it more from a feeling of obligation than anything else ~ i am not in the target audience group (mid- to late-teenaged girls), this was not the book i had been hoping to receive, i already have several other books going ~ so i could still feel a part of the programme. Well! I was wrong in my low expectations, i am happy to report. After a few minutes i took the book to bed and, almost before i knew it, was reluctantly finishing for the night on page ninetyeight. Last night i did the same thing, and completed the book less than two days after i received it; such speed is not really unusual for me, often a book can be done in one sitting, but is so far removed from what i anticipated that it deserves comment.

The narrator of the story, Claudia but called Clod by almost everyone from her parents on, witnesses, and wishes she didn't, a particularly nasty murder in a Glasgow shopping mall. Urged by the police to speak of what she saw, she doesn't and is rapidly met by the most gorgeous guy she's ever seen. Swept off her feet, blinded by this man's beauty of character and body, she is rapidly drawn deeper into a situation she can neither understand nor control ~ though the reader understands all too easily, hence a nice layer of suspense which permeates the books pages. The end of the story is quite unusually done, in that Forde stops before we expect her to (i was flipping pages, not quite understanding), without spelling everything out for us, though leaving us to hope that all has ended well, or satisfactorily at least, for a heroine we've grown accustomed to, if not actually fond of.

Complete review available at http://rhydypennau.blogspot.com/2008/04/sugarcoated.html… (mehr)