Recommend: No.
Review is limited in nature due to being written while on holiday in Japan.
My purchasing of Halfway House came out of the combination of two events.
- Got a good review by Cassie on the ABC Bookshelf Podcast.
- I purchased Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlam from Blackheath Gleebooks only to find it at a garage sale for $2 the following weekend. The benefit of buying hundreds of dollars of books a month from Blackheath Gleebooks is they implement a no questions asked policy on book returns.
Halfway House tells the absurd story of an Australian girl in her twenties moving to Edinburgh, Scotland to pursue a slightly above minimum wage job in, you guessed it, a halfway house for high impact criminals.
The cover makes it look like this is a thriller but it’s absolutely not. There’s a central mystery around the love interest but Fitzgerald doesn’t have mastery over suspense. I would put it more cleanly in the class of Rom-Com mixed with Airport Lounge fiction. All of that is fitting, as this was the book I took with me on the flight to Japan, to be read under a helpful Valium calm.
It’s a super easy, light-hearted read with a fairly well-animated main character. That’s about it. The context of working in a halfway house sounds interesting but the implementation is far-fetched and totally unrelatable as a result. The plot twists can be surprising but Fitzgerald’s pacing is off. She puts a lot of high ticket items closely together in the plot so the twists kind of just mould back into the main story. When the core of the novel is already unbelievable it’s harder to ask the reader to stretch reality when the actual twists come in.
It wouldn’t be fair to say this is a bad novel because it is so clearly not aiming for any lasting impact. I wouldn’t criticise a snail for being slow. I was hoping there’d be funnier scenes given it’s trying to be a humour novel but the characters were drawn quite blandly which made it difficult to get that comedy across the line.
On a flight, this worked as easy-to-digest distraction. When I was off the flight it was a chore to finish the final third. I’m not going to expect a souffle on a flight and equally I am not going to be able to focus on Hemingway, so there’s no space to complain when you get cold broccoli and Halfway House.
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