2021 - Discussion Thread Q1 - Adventures of Maud West

Full credit to the author for the immense amount of research that went into writing this one, it can't have been easy to track down all that information about a woman who clearly did not want to be found, and in a day and age where records aren't as easily accessible as they are today. To make things even more complicated, Maud West is not her real name, so figuring that out took half the book in itself, and she came from a family with a tradition of reusing names so there was some source of confusion. Her maintenance of multiple personas adds another level of complication to the research into her life story.

I don't know if the author had decided that she didn't like Maud West during the course of her research and wrote her "character" as such, but whether intentional or not she didn't exactly paint West in the most appealing of manners. I found myself quite horrified in a number of situations at quite how low she was willing to go, and the author makes no attempt to soften the landing in any way whatsoever. But perhaps that is simply what she is like, her family life is complicated to say the least and West clearly had no qualms with going on the wrong side of the law to achieve what she set out to do.

That being said, I was genuinely interested in the story of her life and the book did well in keeping that interest sustained throughout. Given that, I struggled more with this one than I thought I would, I think the structure just didn't work for me. The narrative jumps from one thing to another (without warning) far too often, and I found it quite difficult to reconstruct how things related to one another in my head. The book alternates between a narrative in the author's "voice", describing Maud West and what she got up to, and case reports by West herself. This would have been a brilliant vehicle for telling the story of her life, given her occupation, but it really wasn't used very well here. The cases seemed to be completely random, not relating to the point that was discussed right before nor the point that will be discussed immediately after, and seemed more like a way of simply jumping from one thing to another. It didn't help that I was liking West less and less as I went along, or at least the author's portrayal of her.

Overall, This is one that I don't regret reading, it was an interesting retelling of the life of someone I didn't know about before with an interesting occupation in a time in history that I don't know much about, but I thought the execution massively let it down. I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads.

I'm very interested to hear what you (and others of course) thought of it!

I will be joining in with this Read, but the book has been waiting for me at my local Library since before Christmas .. 

If anyone else has joined in, or does in the future, please add your review / comments here at any time ..