Love in Idleness

When Anna graduates from Edinburgh University, she has no plan for her future except a determination to distance herself from her managing mother, Magda, in stultifying Somerset, by living in London. She jumps at the offer of accommodation in her Aunt Stella's flat, rejecting her mother's attempts to involve her in her network of contacts. She prefers to speculate about her enigmatic aunt's more attractive life, fuelled by telephone messages from Stella's male friends. Alone in the flat while Stella works abroad, Anna looks for a job in a bookshop and tries to find her own adult self in a hostile and indifferent world. It may be unfair to criticize a first novel too much. Mendelson has undoubted writing talent, but it is as if Anita Brookner were trying to write a younger version of Bridget Jones; a lot of navel-gazing interspersed with annoying introspective listmaking, while what plot there is crawls towards a less than startling denouement. I found it hard to believe that someone of 22, with three years of university behind her, could be quite so gauche and unaware. There are tantalizing glimpses of a better novel waiting to be developed. What sort of family has produced Anna's younger drug-taking sister, and why has Anna cut her arms? What exactly has been the relationship between Magda and Stella? There is some fertile ground here, scattered with promising seeds, but they fail to germinate satisfactorily. (Kirkus UK)