{"id":1448,"date":"2015-10-08T22:20:10","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T09:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=1448"},"modified":"2016-04-08T22:29:08","modified_gmt":"2016-04-08T10:29:08","slug":"soon-charlotte-grimshaw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2015\/10\/08\/soon-charlotte-grimshaw\/","title":{"rendered":"Soon — Charlotte Grimshaw"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Soon\"Two very interesting characters inhabit this story: Roza, the Prime Minister’s wife, a creative maverick who still manages to fit in with his circle; and her precocious young son Johnny, who is clever and manipulative and a bit of a nightmare. Throughout the novel, Roza tells Johnny a story featuring a large cast of characters including a nasty dwarf called Soon, and surreal happenings, all based on the other people in the novel. It’s like a terrifyingly twisted Enid Blyton romp, and it’s fun drawing parallels between Roza’s story and the novel.<\/p>\n

The rest of Soon is nicely written and compelling, but the plot and the other characters are a bit more formulaic than Roza and Johnny. It’s a story of powerful people behaving badly. The right-wing Prime Minister himself is popular, but is also a cynical, amoral figure; a parallel here to the current New Zealand political scene, and also to another novel within this novel.<\/p>\n

There’s lots to chew on in this book. The way these privileged people interact with each other and the world around them is carefully and plausibly rendered. It’s a bit depressing to consider how accurate it might be.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two very interesting characters inhabit this story: Roza, the Prime Minister’s wife, a creative maverick who still manages to fit in with his circle; and her precocious young son Johnny, who is clever and manipulative and a bit of a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4,95,19,63],"class_list":["post-1448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-books","tag-charlotte-grimshaw","tag-new-zealand","tag-novels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1448"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1619,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1448\/revisions\/1619"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}