PERFECT.

PERFECT by RACHEL JOYCE.

Summer, 1972: In the claustrophobic heat, eleven-year-old Byron and his friend begin ‘Operation Perfect’, a hapless mission to rescue Byron’s mother from impending crisis. 

Winter, present day: As frost creeps across the moor, Jim cleans tables in the local café, a solitary figure struggling with OCD. His job is a relief from the rituals that govern his nights.

Little would seem to connect them except that two seconds can change everything. 

And if your world can be shattered in an instant, can time also put it right?
- Back Cover Blurb

In 1972, two seconds were added to time.
- First Sentence, Prologue; The Addition Of Time

Beyond the estate, the moor looms dark and solid. Timeless layers of earth and grass have been ground to stone. An old moon shines over the land and a thousand million stars send points of light across the years. If the land stretched now, opened right up and swallowed the houses, the roads, the pylons, the lights, there would be no memory of anything human. There would only be the dark, sleeping hills and the ancient sky.
- Memorable Moment, Page 129

SOURCE ... A charity shop buy.

READ FOR A CHALLENGE? ... Yes.

• 9 of 12 books read for the 2018 Mount TBR Challenge.

MY THOUGHTS ... A book, the author's second. I must admit to feeling rather ambivalent about reading this, indeed I may well have passed it by if it weren't for the author's wonderful first novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. However ....

With its themes of class and gender, the burden of parental expectations and mental illness, for me personally, a novel that tried too hard to do too much; that more bleak than I had anticipated, at times, relentlessly so, I essentially found it all a bit depressing; that, whilst content that the revelation re the connection between Byron and Jim (this being the mystery that drove the whole story) would happen, it did so at a snail's pace and  felt all a bit contrived, alas, for me personally, Perfect was, well, less than Perfect.

Not without its redeeming features. The authors portrayal of his mental health issues amongst the most sensitively dealt with I've ever come across in fiction, beautiful to behold, I did enjoy Jim's story which, not without some humour, lent some much needed light to what was otherwise a somewhat dismal story.