![]() ![]() The person who abides by the commitment with absolute conviction is Silvie’s amateur-archaeologist father, who’s as vile a character as you could hope not to meet. Most of these happy campers make greater or lesser compromises with the ideal - the local Spar does good business selling junk food to people in coarse-woven tunics - but they do indeed largely subsist on vegetables foraged from the wilds, mussels, fish, snared rabbits, and so on. ![]() Teenager Silvie is taken with her family, a bunch of students and an archaeology professor to spend a fortnight living in the Northumbrian countryside as the Iron Age population there, the bog people, might have done. Failing to use either of these stratagems simply makes the text less clear, and for no purpose that I could ascertain - or even guess at. There are good reasons why they use paragraph breaks for alternating lines of dialogue. ![]() There are good reasons why people use quotation marks. As it was, I read the book in the print version and so had to cope with the author’s idiosyncratic ideas on punctuation, which meant that the main emotion I felt toward a tale that could have been right up my street was irritation. I would probably have loved this had I listened to an audiobook version (not that I ever do listen to audiobooks, but this is just a hypothetical, you understand). ![]()
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