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Jess Mount is in her early twenties, lives in Leeds with her widowed father, her mother having died when she was just fifteen. She works in a movie complex with her best friend Sadie.

After a chance encounter with the highly attractive Lee Griffiths, Jess’s life is set on a path which may result in her being dead in a year’s time as, shortly after meeting Lee, she is horrified to discover Facebook posts from the future in which her family and friends commiserate over her death and detail the events leading up to it. Just as frightening, it appears she had a baby son called Harrison a few months before she died.
 
Spoiler Alert!  Some books are impossible to review fairly without revealing major plot points, and this is one of them, so don’t read further if you’d rather not know more.
 
The fact that no-one else apart from Jess can read these Facebook posts is a hint that perhaps all is not OK with her mental health, as otherwise this would have to be some kind of fantasy time-travel tale when it is clearly developing into an edgy contemporary narrative featuring female denial in the face of male control.
 
Because of this unusual narrative, the book is both fascinating and frustrating. For some readers there will be a major issue with its underlying tenet - i.e. a girl must have suffered earlier psychological damage to get involved with a violent man in the first place. Such readers might well argue in the real world this is not always the case and some of the smartest and most level-headed women have let their hearts rule their heads with disastrous consequences. Jess is given clear warnings, not just from the future, but from those around her in the present, especially Sadie, that she should steer clear of Lee yet she does not walk away because she wants a life for her unborn child. Getting your head around this bizarre logic is also difficult.
 
Even though I was impatient with Jess’s willing compliance to do nothing to avoid her own looming death, I was sufficiently intrigued to see how the situation would pan out and whether there was some final inventive twist to explain the Facebook posts, but there is none. If anything, one might detect faint allegorical echoes here of “A Christmas Carol” in which Scrooge only finally learns his lesson and gets his act together after his encounter with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
 
The author’s end notes give some explanations to the book’s genesis and why she wrote it as she did and, it spite of my problems with it, it is certainly an inventive and memorable work that challenged me and has made me curious to read more by author Linda Green.
 
Four stars - or only two - depending on the levels of credibility you are prepared to accept in your fiction.
 
(With many thanks to Hachette Australia for sending me the reading copy.)

Booktopia

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Long before people went searching for their soulmates on the Internet, there were discreet businesses where, for a fee, you would be put in touch with your ideal match as potential wife or husband. London’s first such marriage bureau was founded by two friends, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, just months prior to the outbreak of World War II.
 
Written by Penrose Halson, a subsequent owner of the business, and based on Jenner’s personal archives, this tells the story of the Bureau’s early clients and also how it struggled initially for acceptance when society still had fixed ideas about how one went about finding a suitable partner, never mind the suspicions that two attractive young women in business might be up to something immoral.
 
Although marketed as non-fiction, it’s pretty obvious the truth has been greatly embroidered with fiction in the same voice throughout. It has all the “carry-on regardless” attitude that prevailed during war-time London and in places almost borders on a Brian Rix farce, with clients such as a dodgy Arabian “sheik”- or is he really Welsh? - and a man who wants a wife with only one leg. These, and many other peculiar and occasionally hilarious demands of the clients and notes by the interviewers, fill several pages of appendices at the end of the book.
 
A few working-class types did venture into the elite preserve of Bond Street in an effort to find partners, but on the whole there is a preponderance of certain types from the upper middle classes, retired brigadiers and daughters of peers, gay (in the old-fashioned sense) divorcees, trembling virgins, bumbling chaps from the colonies, twerps called Cedric and frumpy spinsters called Myrtle. Some of the owners and secretaries who worked at the bureau were quirky as well and apparently there really was a woman called Picot Schooling. The loneliness, desperation and tragedies at the heart of some of these personal lives are glossed over and the result is lightweight rather than insightful or philosophical.
 
If you love all those rather twee British TV series such as “Call the Midwife”, “Father Brown” or “Home Fires” then this book is definitely for you. Must admit I did enjoy its nostalgia and look forward to another wallow when the Bond Street Bureau comes to our screens - as it surely must!
 
Perhaps not quite four toodle pips, but a jolly spiffing three.

Note: This book has the more pragmatic title of The Marriage Bureau in the US, I guess with the assumption Americans are unaware of the prestige of a Bond Street address.


Booktopia

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