Review: Kate Hamer – The Girl in the Red Coat

The Girl in the Red Coat
Kate Hamer

A moment’s lapse of attention and Beth’s daughter Carmel is swept away. As Beth tries to come to terms with her grief, Carmel is in her own story surrounded with adults who don’t care about her.

Carmel is so incredibly dumb. For an 8-year old, hasn’t she been taught about going off with strangers? Even if they do profess to be related, didn’t she ever know how to call other people? Or remember her own phone number? Doesn’t she know how to call the police? Why didn’t she ask to go to the funeral? Ugh. I couldn’t love her.

I felt more sorry for Beth and felt that she was more realistically portrayed. Unfortunately there wasn’t very much of her story, and no depth. How can anyone understand a mother’s grief? Why does she have to move on?

The supernatural in this novel happened too late for me to save it. And really, it just proved the religious righteousness, and then in the end nothing more was made of it. If you read this novel, you’ll understand – but I don’t recommend you read it at all.

I have no complaints about the language, or the world building (although since it is set in what I would call regular times that’s not a big problem). The pacing of this novel was its undoing. Sooooo slow. I tried to keep puttering along with reading it, but nothing significant occurred that anchored me into the reading.

I confess, I did not finish this novel. I have so many other good things to read, I couldn’t force myself to finish it. I got about half-way in, stopped reading for a couple of days, tried to get back into it, and then just read the last three chapters. I can fairly safely say that I didn’t miss anything, since it took a good long many years to get through the rest of the ‘trials and tribulations’.