"The Little Drummer Girl" is the third book that I've abandoned in my "20 for 20 Reading Challenge" to read twenty books that are more than twenty hours long.

I've really enjoyed the Le Carré books that I've read so far, all of which post-date "The Little Drummer Girl". This book didn't work for me. I listened to the first six and a half hours of the book and found myself increasingly reluctant to return to it, so I've pressed the life's-too-short button and abandoned it,

The book is well written and well-narrated. It has some very powerful scenes in it. The characters are well-drawn and the places are well-described. My problem started with the pace, which is slow and evolved into the characters, none of whom I care about.

After six and a half hours we've finally reached the point where our young British actress has been successfully recruited to work with the Israelis to help them (somehow) take down a Palestinian terrorist cell. I know every detail of the process used to recruit her and it seems to me to be as credible as it is frightening. Reading it was like watching a craftsman build a brick wall with a complex pattern embedded in it or watching a wrangler tame a wild horse. It's fascinating in its own way but you have to care about the craftsman or the horse. I found I didn't care for either.

So I'll never know what Charlie's mission was or whether she succeeded in it or how many people died along the way. I'm OK with that.

I'll be back for other Le Carré books but I'm saying good-bye to this one.

I seem to have books I'm a bit stuck with at the moment. I have hopes for all of them but they're a test of faith at the moment.

"The Paper Eater" is an out-there piece of SF which I think is meant to be a satire but it has unsympathetic characters and innovative punctuation that I find distracting.

"The Little Drummer Girl" is fine, if slow, while I'm listening to it but it's not something I find myself rushing to get back to. I've been using it as the soundtrack to my daily one hour walks.

My wife really enjoyed "The Holiday". I found the first chapter a bit thin but I'm told great things are to come.

I hope you all have a great reading weekend.

I can't make my mind up about this book. It's moving only slightly faster than real-life. It's like watching a plot come together in slow motion or, perhaps, like a field guide on how to recruit foreign nationals as agents to crack terrorist cells.

It feels authentic and fully realised but I'm not sure I need or want to know all this logistical stuff.  

This book seems to want me to admire the mechanics of espionage but I'm someone who has never opened the bonnet of my car to see what the engine looks like, I just use it to get me places. I'd like this book to get me somewhere fairly soon.

We're celebrating the release of DRUMMER GIRL by Ginger Scott! One-click your copy on all platforms today!

 

Drummer Girl by Ginger Scott

Drummer Girl

A mature YA/New Adult contemporary rock star romance by Ginger Scott

Arizona Wakefield was a beat without a melody. Living a half-breathing life in a half-finished neighborhood with parents who always wore half-hearted smiles, the high school senior only had one thing that let her color outside her family’s perfectly drawn lines—her drums.

Jesse Barringer was a song without a chorus. The son of a washed-up rock star who’s also one hell of a deadbeat dad, he was given two things from his father—musical genius and a genetic link to the bipolar disorder that drives him mad.

One night in a garage at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of a bankrupt California neighborhood, Jesse’s melody found Arizona’s rhythm. An angry boy with storm-colored eyes found a blonde angel in Doc Martens with missing lines in her own story. Where her rhythm stopped, his words took over, and together, they wrote one hell of a story.

** Drummer Girl is a mature YA/New Adult romance that touches on mental health, drug abuse and includes mature sexual situations.

EXCERPT:

About the Author:

Ginger Scott is an Amazon-bestselling and Goodreads Choice Award-nominated author of several young and new adult romances, including Waiting on the Sidelines, Going Long, Blindness, How We Deal With Gravity, This Is Falling, You and Everything After, The Girl I Was Before, Wild Reckless, Wicked Restless, In Your Dreams, The Hard Count, Hold My Breath, and A Boy Like You.

A strong book by John Le Carre -- I love his exact observations and his careful illumination of his central characters. It is a difficult situation -- the Palestinian / Israeli conflict, but Le Carre manages to outline the events in a way that is properly morally ambiguous.

His descriptions are so precise, that Le Carre makes it appear that what he is imagining on the page is sincerely happening, or has already happened. And when I read Le Carree, he makes me see the world around me more precisely.

Not as strong as his masterwork, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, but still pretty strong.

Powerful writer, good story, thoughtful novelist.