Hope Nicely's Lessons for Life

I can kind of respect the idea behind this - using a character with FASD is a brave move. I can see the potential for a heartwarming story here. Did this book work for me? Not really. Might it work for other people? Perhaps.

The basic premise follows one of those oft repeated maxims of story telling - write about what you know. In this case, the author has chosen to set it literally in a writing workshop. It uses some of the other classic maxims as its themes, such as ‘show, don't tell'. Unfortunately, whilst preaching about these things it does tend to ignore them quite a lot. In fact to me quite a lot of the setting and theming came across a little bit lazy - even the character name ‘Hope Nicely' feels kind of lazy.

Where the author has put in the effort is in the research into FASD. I can believe that Hope Nicely is suffering from this and it is clear from her notes that she has researched this topic properly. The next question for me is how that affects me as the reader - the problem with reading from the perspective of a character who is perpetually confused is that the reader then ends up very confused.

To me this is a nice idea, but it doesn't quite work. It ends up being a bit lazy and confused.