Book – Don’t Tell Mum
Authors – Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk
Year – 2006
Genre – Humour
Pages – 174
Think of all of the hilarious stories that your friends bring back from their time travelling. I have many friends who have been travelling over the years, and many of them bring back genuinely funny, exciting stories. It is good to know what your friends have been up to, and I have loved to see how excited they get about places they’ve visited and people they have met.
Now think about being given these same stories about someone you don’t know. And in abridged form. And being smacked over the head by several hundred of them. And they usually aren’t that interesting.
Guess which of those situations is more like this book. There are moments of this that are entertaining enough, but this series of ’emails to home’ falls flat because they are largely similar stories about people who we don’t know or care about getting into scrapes that usually involve being drunk and falling over. An unfortunate case of something that is usually interesting in real life, not transferring over to an interesting book.
Maybe it’s just because I am not someone who has ever gone travelling – or more to the point not a parent of someone who has gone travelling – but without being absolutely dreadful, the whole thing is a little dull, which is almost worse.
5/10