STARTER FOR TEN.

STARTER FOR TEN by DAVID NICHOLLS.

1985:First-year student and Kate Bush fan Brian falls for beautiful University Challenge queen Alice Harbinson in a brilliant comedy of love, class, growing up and the all-important difference between knowledge and wisdom.
....... Outer back cover.

FIRST SENTENCE (Chapter 1): All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing-up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, as pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.

MEMORABLE MOMENT (Page 309) "....... Your mum could have sent you down a coal mine, and you'd still come up middle class. It's the things you say, the books you read, that film you just made me sit through, it's the way you go on school trips and spend your money on educational books and postcards instead of fags and arcade games, it's the way you ask for black pepper in the chippy"

KEEP IT OR NOT?: To be returned but I would like a copy for our shelves.

A reading group read, I'm not at all sure that I would have picked this up otherwise as to me there was nothing appealing about it, neither the front cover design nor the back cover blurb 'spoke' to me - huh, it just goes to show how wrong I can be.

Though I didn't find this novel earth-shattering in any way shape or form and I didn't find myself reading until silly o'clock there was something about it that had me reading from getting up until going to bed.

Right from the start I found Starter For Ten a funny read, albeit in a somewhat toe-curling embarrassing kind of way that bordered on mortifying at times.

The author really seemed to get under the skins of the characters and I thought wrote the male and female characters equally well -I disliked the awful Alice almost as much as I liked the somewhat geeky Brian who has the amazing gift of seemingly always managing to put his 'foot in his mouth' by saying the wrong thing and the wonderfully down to earth, says it as she sees it, Scottish Rebecca. And that was only the three main characters, the other characters were equally well observed and none of them surplice to requirements as is sometimes the case with non-main characters.

 The 81st book read for my 100+ Reading Challenge, this was a great read, set in the 1980's, there were many aspects to this novel that left me feeling so nostalgic for that era.