A Long Way Down Book Review

In my quest to finish the list of books that are going to be movies this year, I got the next book on the list, A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby.  I knew nothing about this before I got it and the front cover says that he is the author of High Fidelity, About A Boy and How to Be Good and I know that the first two are movies so he is obviously successful getting his books accepted as movies.  That must also mean that his books and movies are popular but I know that I haven't read any of the books before.... I may have seen the movies but I couldn't swear to it either way.

This books starts with Martin, JJ, Jess and Maureen meeting in the strangest way on New Year's Eve and are bonded for life.  They all go to the top of a tall building, Toppers' House, in London, England because they want to jump.  Martin, television talk show host, has gone through a scandal with a underage girl so he went to jail and lost his wife and children in the process so he is dealing with putting his life back together in the public eye.  JJ, a former rock band member, has decided to end his life because his band broke up and his girlfriend left him because he wasn't playing music anymore and he is an American stranded in a dead end job after his life disintegrated.  Jess, the teenage daughter of politic father, decided that she was heart broken over the loss of her boyfriend so she was ending her life and pain.  Maureen, a single mother to a high disabled son, has decided that her life is not worth living because all she does is care for someone who doesn't care about her.  Each character tells their story and how they help each other with the pact to not kill themselves for a period of time and then check back before making their next move.  You have to read the book to see all of the situations that they get themselves into through this process.

I am glad that I decided to stretch myself to read some different types of books even if they aren't all my favorites.  This one was not one of my favorites.  My dad is an English teacher and gave long speeches to me about the differences between a story focusing on the plot and one focusing on character development.  This was clearly about character development.  I just didn't feel that the characters had any earth shattering changes that made it worth reading.  The book was set in London so there was a lot of speech patterns that I just couldn't get past.  I don't normally have that problem but there was something distracting and it might be because one of the people was American so it switched back and forth between the way that the different characters were speaking.  In addition, there was a lot of swearing/cursing used (I realized that my friends just laughed at me with this strange issue to the book based on my before kid mouth) but I found that bad words were coming out of my mouth more often when reading this book so I don't think that it was a good influence on me :)  I hope that you check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.  I am sure there are a bunch of people out there that might totally disagree with me but I would give it 2.5 stars out of 5.

Feel free to join me in my quest to read all these books and see if I am interested in seeing the movies!