ExpatWoman Book Club | Dubai | This month's book choice

The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey

Dubai
Book Club The White Woman
on the Green Bicycle

I chose this book to review for a couple of reasons. Firstly (and probably the most important reason to choose any book) was that I liked the sound of it and secondly when I clicked on to Amazon there were no customer reviews. Let me tell you, I don’t like being told what to enjoy and what I should be reading – probably not the right thing for a book reviewer to be confessing to but if you’re reading this then you disagree so that’s good for me!

So, let’s start with a very quick idea of what it’s about. George and Sabine Harwood move to live in Trinidad from their home in England. They move there in 1956, a time of great change in the country which when coupled with the emotions arising from a move to a foreign land make for a tumultuous time, particularly for Sabine.

The book is split into 4 years and starts in 2006, the present day. I’m not always a fan of books starting in the present and then going back in time – it’s almost as if I’m reading the end of the book before I start which I suppose it is. For me the book got interesting in the second section, 1956, arrival in Trinidad. It’s also where the book changes into a first person account by Sabine. It’s a shame it took 189 pages for me to start to find it compelling. I can’t say the book was hard to get into, it wasn’t. Just similar to when watching a film and the pace picks up halfway – this book has a slow start but stick with it.

Sabine struggles in Trinidad and her first pages describing buying strange produce and asking at the local country club where to buy certain things struck a chord with me living in Dubai. I liked Sabine at this time and as a character she seems to be vibrant and almost enjoy the experience and so I was a bit disappointed when it transpires she never enjoyed it at all – I felt a bit cheated, as though she hadn’t even given the country a chance. I struggled a bit with feeling sorry for her and I confess to getting annoyed too with her husband who doesn’t really notice what she’s going through.

The other thing I feel I have to mention is a word the author uses constantly in the first half of the book – ‘’steupsed’’. If Roffey uses it once she uses it a dozen times – I tried looking it up on Google and had no joy. I did actually guess what it meant and was proved right in the second half of the book but I felt it was an unnecessary thing to do to the reader – makes me think the author was trying too hard to be clever with a new word she’d just discovered and so uses it at every opportunity.

Did I like this book? Well, yes, I think I did but it’s not one I would rave about. I found it repetitive at times, frustrating and sometimes boring. It has stuck with me though so it’s more of a slow burner than I first realized maybe – if I’m still thinking of it in a week’s time then that will be something but I rather think I won’t be.

Lesley

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