Review of Ironing

[Mboneleli B]

[Following is a volunteer review of "Ironing" by Navajo.]

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3 out of 4 stars

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Ironing by Navajo is an interesting book to read. It chronicles one day in London and narrates a day in the lives of London residents. These people include; a group of three girls who take the bus headed to a dog racing contest, a man and woman that play chess together with different intentions, a group of three boys that roam around the London streets, parents who are astonished to find out that their daughter is getting married and a girl looking for her perfect mate in a dating app.

This book was very well written, creativity at its best. It was very humorous and experimental in its approach to story telling. Contrary to a normal book, that tells the story from one setting in the whole book, this book is written like a movie. It cuts from scene to scene. It could give an update on how the girls' bus ride is going and then right after that scene, give an update on the dating app girl's day. This is rare and was very well executed. Another aspect I liked was that the book was very realistic. It was describing very realistic struggles and stuff I usually see people go through. Another thing that makes it real, is that most of the people in the book know each other, which would be true for me living in the same city. Did I mention that this book was really funny?

What I would say was a negative aspect of the book was the dead - ends. The book includes some people and never follows up on them again, which left me confused. It also makes it seem like a waste of space in the book, as if it were an attempt to reach a certain word count that the author was assigned to reach. For example, it said Yu Yan sat quietly with Juliet and it was not revealed where that ended up but when the story returned to Yu Yan, it sees her with Victor and she didn't appear in the story after that, which made me doubt the need of her appearance in the story. So I feel as if the story lacked a little bit of cohesiveness.

Even though I found the book coming up short in cohesiveness, I still enjoy reading it and I still commend the creativity put into the concept of the story so I'll gladly rate this book three out four stars. It was an entertaining piece of art.

I would recommend this book to young adults, as older people would probably not appreciate the vulgar language and content in this book, and they might confuse the colloquial terms for grammatical mistakes.

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Ironing
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