I'm kind of surprised I even remember the password to my account. Well, the positive is that, despite the months of hiatus, I don't have a pointlessly crazy amount of books to catch up on because I didn't read that much (not quite sure that's a positive actually, but hey!).
Life, in the shape of an upcoming second child, is getting in the way. And I'm also helping my father-in-law translate his book from Portuguese (a language I don't speak) into English (a language that is not my first).
Anyway, back to a book I remember relatively little about, except that I got it at the IKEA Booker Prize event, and that I thought it was a Northwest London story that was well-written and interesting, but little more than that (if both the plot and the location remind one of Zadie Smith, then your work is really quite likely to pale in comparison). Also, I got it because its author had actually worked at the IKEA in Neasden...
So the overall rating would be "good enough": I liked the kid hoping to turn his life around by running for Brunel (a long shot, but I have great memories of playing basketball there and of their sports centre), and the depiction of the riots in the estate was quite compelling (but even here, nothing too new when one thinks of some of the biggest British books of the last few decades).
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