Imagine if, for once, someone sent out a 'round robin' Christmas letter that told things as they really are. This is the rather interesting premise behind Hello from the Gillespies.
Angela Gillespie lives on an outback farm in Australia and her life is a source of frustration to her... Her three elder daughters have returned home after failing to get ahead by themselves. Her young son has a variety of problems/oddities. Her husband is beset by debt and finds solace in obsessively researching his ancestry. Meanwhile Angela finds comfort in a daydream fantasy life she has concocted for herself.
After a freak accident Angela is 'lost' to her family. But this could just be the catalyst they all need to put their lives back on course and come together once more.
Hello from the Gillespies clocks in at 600 odd pages but it's a quick read as it contains a lot of dialogue and a lot of the story is pretty insubstantial. I didn't dislike it, but it didn't enthrall me. It was a slow moving story - I felt that it could have been better edited and that the story could have been told in a shorter format. I also didn't find the characters in the story to be ones that I could connect with - the children were simply annoying, Angela herself was a little silly and her husband, Nick, was so dull and flat.
I thought at one point that the book was an old one as the family only had one computer between the six of them but it is only a year or so old... isn't it odd that nobody had a laptop? Not even the daughter who worked in media? There were quite a few discrepancies of this sort in it that irritated me.
Overall the book was just okay, I am surprised by how many positive reviews it had.
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