Never Look Back

People have described 'Never Look Back' as one of the best intriguing novels Lesley Pearce has written. I contend she is the most lazy author I have ever read, and if anything, should have put this particular story in seven books and not one. She has the amazing gift of skipping to the end, wilfully overlooking what would be the more interesting story and preferring to refer back to the alleged incident in one or two sentences. Example: Matilda is ready to embark on a dangerous journey with her baby on her back in a canoe in troubled waters with a native American guide, gets in the boat and suddenly in the story it's two weeks later and nothing more than a quick blurb after the fact said! Thanks for that. For a book entitled 'Never Look Back' this author breaks this rule consistently. One should be warned of the quality of the book by the simple fact Lesley fantastically has the sun, like a huge orange fireball (page 113, 2000 edition, Penguin softback) sinking into the sea on the Eastern seaboard! According to Lesley Pearce (and the anti-male protagonist, Matilda) all men, except the main good characters, are evil, callous, swarthy, rough looking, insolent, drunk and sex-crazed. Matilda contradicts herself often, for example, she is shocked when she arrives in San Francisco about the above said debauchery by the men there yet she soon embarks on making an entertainment hall which serves drink and has dancing girls! She is so shocked by the drunkenness and dead animals in the streets, she won't allow her own daughter to move there, presuming the poor sod Cissie left behind will do the drudgery, and then when San Francisco finally cleans up, produces ladies of finery, schools of education, respectable churches, etc. Matilda seems to forget about that objective and even that she had a child. When Matilda visits her daughter and family back in Oregon, absolutely nothing is said of the visit until after the visit, some weeks or months later, in a kind of 'looking back' or retrospective way. (*SPOILER ALERT* and then we are expected to believe Matilda had any relationship with her young daughter at all and that she actually cared when she died of cholera at age six.) And true to Lesley Pearce's nature (if her regular writing style is similar to that of this book) *SPOILER ALERT* Everyone dies in childbirth. And if not that, it's death by trees, random gunshots, and cholera. I am sure that people died a lot quite often in that time, but you grow to get an uncomfortable tingling sensation when everything is going okay and people are happy and reconciled, because just around the corner, somebody really important to the plot dies. In addition to unjust murder of key characters, Lesley Pearce should be ashamed of her old fashioned stereotypes of people who are not white like herself. Mexican men are all described as having droopy mustaches. The banker is Jewish with a clearly Jewish name (Jacob Weinburg) and has a prominent nose and is ugly, a point which the main characters go out of their way to comment on. (Even though he was nice enough to lend money to them.) And to top it off, she even describes a maid entering the room as a NEGRESS, and this isn't even from the main character's point of view (perhaps forgiven due to the era) but is an author's narration. Shameful. All the black characters are described as black, negro, dark skinned, etc, and never simply as a character. They also all have wide grins, thick lips and wide, splayed out noses. Yeah, we know. But you might want to grind it in a bit more and have Delores 'done make a mess of chicken.'

Found this to be very long and a little bit far fetched you could guess that the people were going to die. Not one of my favourite Lesley pearse books.

First book to read of her collection and it won't be the last , it was an astonishing story, loved it . I read it in the train to and from work , in bed and whenever i had a chance , I just got hooked .