80 Books No. 13: Black Rabbit Summer by Kevin Brooks

I’ve been bumping into this book for years and have been thinking I should read it. The cover and the title interested me and looked like exactly the kind of thing I like in a teenage book. When I bumped into it again in the library, I figured I might as well get it out this time.

And in it I found a story I thoroughly enjoyed. So much so that I started reading it at about 2.30pm on Sunday and finished it about 11.30pm that night. Definitely one good way of getting to eighty books in a year and it was partially because I had a surprisingly free Sunday, but it was also the kind of book I could hardly put down. The story was intriguing: what exactly happened at the fairground the night Pete and his old friends go there? I liked the way coincidences sometimes turned out to be coincidences and sometimes something more – usually completely the other way round to how I expected. The character of Raymond was very well drawn in my opinion and the unreliable nature of Pete’s account made for interesting reading.

There was a convenience about the plot which in retrospect was a little daft – the actual solution to the mystery was a little trite, and the untied up ends were a little frustrating. However, they added some veracity to the tale, as loose ends are never all tied up in real life; in this respect I noted a similarity to Kate Atkinson’s Brodie Jackson books which I didn’t fully enjoy when I read them. However, none of this bothered me as I read the book and I’m probably being picky here.

The one thing I probably would alter about the book even as I was reading it was something that drew me towards the novel in the first place: the title. Perhaps part of my interest in the title was that When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman is one of my favourite novels of recent years – and I’ve always liked rabbits. There was a similar connection between the rabbit and people in this novel, but the impact of Black Rabbit upon the plot was a little thin, and the whole notion of it being ‘Black Rabbit Summer’ was a little negated by the fact that the events of the novel took about four days to happen.

Still, I’m, as I said, largely being picky, because I really enjoyed this for what it was at the time. My next read is slightly similar in nature and I’ll compare the two when I get to finishing it.