***SPOILERS***Aisla and Harry decide to move their family from the busy streets of London to the more quiet Norfolk.Their daughter Romy has always been their pride and joy, never disappointing them and always achieving high grades. However, the arrival of new neighbours Wolf and Loveday seems to be the reason Romy stops being 'the good girl' and becomes more of a mystery to her parents. This is nowhere near as captivating as it sounds. Romy falls for one of the neighbours's sons, Jay, who struggles with an addiction to porn and she hopes to be the one to change this, making a pornographic video with him that goes viral. She herself is struggling with the real reason her parents moved away from London, after overhearing a conversation implying that her father, who she has always been closest to, had an affair. Neill alternates the chapters between Romy's point of view and Ailsa's, who it turns out is hiding secrets of her own, including who her son, Luke's, real father is.
Neill wants to you be enticed by the secrets that the family are keeping, to make you want to read on, but the secrets are dull and predictable, and most of them clichéd. I was expecting a stronger storyline, with a more explosive ending, but the climax lasted only a few pages and seemed more like a desperate attempt to save the novel. There were simply too many ideas squeezed into one book, with waffling taking up far too much space and not enough time given to character development. Romy seems to have inherited her father's intelligence and love of neuroscience, and small explanations are slotted in throughout the book on what causes addiction and can help to cure it, along with various other scientific explanations that can seem out of place and unnecessary. Her mother being a teacher and her father a professor of neuroscience are not enough to provide a reason for this, and Ailsa's pedantic corrections of grammar annoy even a prescriptivist such as myself. On the other side of the scale is Wolf and Loveday, both well-travelled and interested in sexual healing, with a completely different, more relaxed parental style to Harry and Ailsa. This seems a little typical and obvious from the start that the two couples will clash over their children, as well as being incredibly dull.
I could be being a little harsh on Fiona Neill. The book did not meet expectations - no dark revelations and gasps of shock - but Neill does tackle a modern problem of the powers of the internet; how a video made in the privacy of your own home can be seen on the other side of the world with just a few clicks of a button. It is an interesting subject to tackle, and a real shame Neill could not pull it off. The Daily Mail called it a "coming-of-age tale", which would put it alongside The Perks of being a Wallflower, an insult to a truly great piece of literature and a flippant use of a phrase. Perhaps a more appropriate description would have been a 'cautionary tale', for teenagers who are experiencing technology and the internet being everywhere and easily accessible at a young age. The novel might not have impressed, but it has a good message and is not a bad read for those looking for something light to pass the time.
