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The Year from Jahannam by Shams Uddin (view source)
Revision as of 07:38, 18 June 2012
, 07:38, 18 June 2012no edit summary
The Wright family begin a blog in January 2011. They all want to celebrate a new start after the turmoil of recent years. Father Richard had been a casualty of the financial crisis, working for Lehman Brothers at the time of its collapse, and the ensuing chaos had affected the entire family one way or another. But Richard retrained, secured a new job and has recently earned a huge bonus. At last the family are back on track and enjoying the fruits of hard labour.
But it's not long before things start to go wrong. The family cat disappears. Household items go missing. Strange noises are heard at night. At first, it's easy to explain these things away. But when Tina starts talking to an imaginary friend, dark figures appear in the bedrooms, the new car is stolen and the house is broken into, the Wrights begin to realise these individual events are all connected. They find themselves in a living version of ''Jahannam'' - the Islamic equivalent of hell - and must fight for their very lives. But the real question is "''Why us?''
I thoroughly enjoyed ''The Year from Jahannam'' and my only criticisms are technical ones. The book would be improved by a thorough edit. There are unnecessarily capitalised nouns sprinkled throughout. Punctuation is precarious - with commas where they shouldn't be and missing where they're needed. There is a line break between paragraphs and although blogposts would have them, they just don't look right in a book. These may sound like petty carps but they are a barrier to ease of reading and a professional feel.