The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones
| The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Sam Tyler
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| Summary: When Henry meets Zoe they know that they won't have much time together as she is soon off on a world tour. Join them in this humorous, but also dark, book about how relationships suffer if you keep too many secrets. | |
| Buy? Maybe | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 464 | Date: July 2016 |
| Publisher: Simon and Schuster UK | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781471142468 | |
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Stop for a moment and look down at your belly, in the centre you should have something that looks a little bit like a button. It may be an innie, or an outie, but just consider it for a few moments. Do you feel better? Nope, you shouldn't do as all that navel-gazing does is make you over think things. However, without the concept a million romantic books would never be written as without the human compulsion to destroy things around them, how can any tension arise?
Henry is one such over thinker; he is getting married in the morning and he is not sure that his fiancée is the right woman for him. She may be kind, beautiful and deeply in love with him, but his feelings for her are not the Hollywood passions that he grew up seeing on celluloid. Zoe is elsewhere and is also thinking about her boyfriend – thinking off all the annoying things that he does, but when he dies in a tragic accident all she can think about is guilt. Can these two slightly broken people come together to create a new Hollywood romance?
I am not one for reading relationship fiction too often as I find the characters far too self-centred. They spend too much time thinking and not enough time doing. This is certainly the case with the start of Andy Jones' The Trouble with Henry and Zoe. The character of Henry in particular starts off acting like a complete twerp and it takes almost half the book for you to start warming to him again. Zoe's plight is far more effecting as it is laced in tragedy. What is good is that these two characters meet after their initial ruptures and don't tell each other. It is here that the tension in the book rises as they get to know one another, without ever really knowing one another.
To add spice to the book Jones has added a nebulous timeframe to proceedings as Zoe plans to set off on a world tour to find herself, can the relationship mature to a level before this happens? Adding this deadline feels a little contrived to me, almost as if the book is adapted from a screenplay. Any reasonable person would change their plans if they wanted to.
As a relationship drama it holds the attention; the story is told from both points of view. However, I am not sure how enjoyable the book was at times. The tension in the book made it a little harrowing and the characters are not always easy to like. Exponents of the genre will probably see this as essential for giving the book nuance, but for me it just meant that I actively enjoyed parts of the of the book, whilst actively disliking other parts. Evoking an emotional response from a reader of any sort is a skill, but I am unsure that challenging the reader to not enjoy the book can be seen as a good thing.
For regular readers of will they/won't they fiction, Henry and Zoe seems to hit all the tropes to make the book a pleasant and flighty read. I have to imagine that there are better exponents of the genre out there, but I am equally sure that there is also far worse.
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion seems to be the go to book for the modern relationship book as it is mentioned on so many other books.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones at Amazon.com.
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