The Fiction Class

By Susan Breen

Arabella’s world revolves around her two main challenges in life: her relationship with her mother, and figuring out the ending to her novel.  Neither seems like a solvable problem, but her writing class, and the conclusions she draws about her students, at least gives her a starting point.

When she is told her mother is sick, she realizes how little time she actually has left to come to terms with who her mother is – and whether or not she’s up to trying to fix their relationship.

Interspersed with her writing classes and accompanying exercises (which I didn’t do, as I was too eager to get on with the story), the story of Arabella and her mother has an arresting appeal.  Both are flawed, both are stuck on their side of their arguments and both are unwilling to budge.

I found this book quite refreshing in that there were no perfect people; even Arabella and her conclusions about people where truly human – unbalanced and unfair, but able to be changed as she discovered more about the people around her.  To me, this made her more likeable, as she was someone that I actually related to, rather than the perfect, demure but strong heroine she was named after.

In fact, the only person I didn’t like in this story was Chuck, and for the same reason that Arabella herself was reluctant to like him.  He seemed too perfect, and there wasn’t really any progress made in understanding him, or why Arabella liked him.  I thought that the others in her class were much easier to understand, as they were as flawed and human as Arabella herself.

This isn’t the normal kind of book I go for, but I’m really glad I picked this one up.  It was well-written (as a book about an author would need to be!), and I really enjoyed it.

Rating: 4/5
Date finished: 23/11/12