{"id":1623,"date":"2018-09-08T12:00:13","date_gmt":"2018-09-08T01:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=1623"},"modified":"2018-09-09T22:24:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-09T11:24:14","slug":"book-review-a-simple-favour-darcey-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/?p=1623","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: A Simple Favour – Darcey Bell"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The success of Gone Girl <\/em>lead to a series of imitators. Some of them are full blooded and can stand on their own, but a lot of them are pale. Gillian Flynn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book was not thrown together, but was carefully constructed and plotted – and she and other authors alike are probably sick of the endless comparisons. When you have a book like Darcey Bell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s A Simple Favour<\/em>, which is a blatant facsimile of Gone Girl<\/em> with all the good parts taken out and a thousand idiotic kitchen sinks thrown in, you have <\/em>to make the comparison. A Simple Favour <\/em>literally could not exist without the intervention of Gillian Flynn, and humanity is collectively stupider for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Mommy Blogger Stephanie has a son, Miles, and a best friend, Emily. One Friday, Emily asks Stephanie to pick up her son Nicky from school \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but never comes to retrieve him. As the days pass Stephanie posts an increasingly panicked series of blog entries, and teams up with Emily\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s husband Sean to share the parenting load. Is Emily merely AWOL, or has something far more sinister befallen her?\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You will notice almost immediately that Stephanie\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s son is Miles and that her late husband was named Davis, the sort of cutesy name combination that should either be commented upon in the text or have been banished in a later round of drafting. Soon after it becomes apparent that this is the least of A Simple Favour<\/em>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s problems, a book containing a multitude of twists, but never the one twist that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re after: a character with an IQ in at least the double digits who tries to make any sense of what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re experiencing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Simple Favour <\/em>uses multiple narrators but none of them offer significantly different angles on the storyline. Stephanie is supposed to be an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153unreliable narrator\u00e2\u20ac\u009d just because she has two modes: mommy blog (Sample entry: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Hi, Moms! I have sad news to report.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) and direct narration where she admits what she omitted from the blogs. The thing about Stephanie is that it becomes apparent too quickly that she has problems not just with impulse control, basic morality, and information disclosure, but also that she is gullible and shockingly unintelligent. Many choices that she makes have no basis in reality and any sensible reader will spend the majority of A Simple Favour <\/em>on the edge of credulity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go too far into the details of a book like this without giving too much away – even when the individual critic thinks the developments are stupid, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably some sort of spoiler honour code in play – but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not an exaggeration to say that past a certain point A Simple Favour <\/em>doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make any sense. Many thrillers are contingent on people being terrible at their jobs, and the police in A Simple Favour <\/em>really have no idea what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re doing, rather like Stephanie herself. The book may as well have only three characters, because no one else registers.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can say this for Bell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work: it is eminently readable, because you have <\/em>to know what tomfoolery is going to happen next. This is better than a book with leaden prose and <\/em>a terrible story, but Bell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s talent for invention trends towards the laughable rather than the legitimately enjoyable. This book contains possibly the single greatest paragraph ever committed to a novel, but it cannot be divulged here. If you get as far as 87%, you will <\/em>be rewarded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Feig, commonly known for his comedies, has made A Simple Favour <\/em>into a film which, based on the trailer, has been changed significantly. You would hope so, because the book that Darcey Bell presents here offers nowhere for its characters to hide. If subtlety seems to have died here, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s okay: it will show up alive and well somewhere else, serving a better novel.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post review, pre-publication update: <\/strong>A screening of A Simple Favour <\/em>shows that Paul Feig leaned the hell in <\/em>on this one. The changes, the tonal shift, the actual visible spine<\/em> on the work means that something good has <\/em>come of this whole fiasco.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The success of Gone Girl lead to a series of imitators. Some of them are full blooded and can stand on their own, but a lot of them are pale. Gillian Flynn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s book was not thrown together, but was carefully constructed and plotted – and she and other authors alike are probably sick of the endless comparisons. When you have a book like Darcey Bell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s A Simple Favour, which is a blatant facsimile of Gone Girl with all the good parts taken out and a thousand idiotic kitchen sinks thrown in, you have to make the comparison. A Simple Favour <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1HLZ6-qb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1625,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions\/1625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/batrock.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}