The sort of book that makes you wish your train had taken 5 hours instead of 4, so you didn’t have to stop reading and pick up your bags and get into a car and get to read just a few more pages and then get home and rush irritably through breakfast and almost dump your boyfriend because you’ve simply got to get back to the book and nothing else matters, see?
The sort of book about which you have a feeling when you first see the cover, and you can remember it from among the hundreds in the sales presentations. Then the manager who can’t stop gushing about it makes the warehouse send you a copy, sweet of her – maybe because you’re new, you think. It stays on your desk, among the unread bad books that come free with the job. But you’re careful not to read certain sorts of books sometimes. And it sounds like that sort of book.
Then you clear up before the holidays and take it home anyway. Where it stays among all the unread good books that are waiting to delight you. Or at least instruct.
You pack your reading for the holidays – not too many, you decide, a mix from both work and home – and there it is, orange and unignorable.
And you finally open a page. You read it. Just the first sentence actually. That’s enough, you know you have to make space for it in your bag or you’ll keep thinking about it, you won’t have any rest till you’ve read the rest of it.
So you do, and then you have to tell everyone about it as soon as you’re done…

1) Because it is beautiful, both the story and the language.
2) Because it is so funny.
3) Because it is tragic yet uplifting. Only tragic is no good, if you ask me.
4) Because Chris Cleave can really get inside your head, whether you’re a teenaged black girl or a 30-something white girl.
5) Because you can’t put it down or help but be moved by it, like, say, The Kite Runner, but neither do you have to be embarrassed because it is anything but soppy, naive or badly-written. It is, in fact, the opposite.
6) Because if you don’t like this, you need to have your head examined.

Update: Hmm…on second thoughts…