Laura and Emma by Kate Greathead

Genre: plotless. ⭐️Stars from Goodreads: 3.2. ⭐️Stars from me: 2

Laura and Emma became my punishment for opting to read a bad book till the end. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure the book was bad and I’m still not. Maybe I am just witnessing the beginning of a new era in book writing, the era of books with no plots.

After all, several years ago an idea of broadcasting mundanities of ordinary lives would sound obscene, and yet there’s Big Brother now.

Thus, maybe Laura and Emma is not a bad book, but a pioneer, the first book of plotless genre. Maybe the book is a reality show for readers. The characters go to work, run errands, do their shopping, argue, have dinners. They even go to the sea, twice, but no plot happens there either.

The characters themselves are realistic, although they do change their personalities quite abruptly while nothing in the plot prompts them to. Because there’s no plot. Duh! The language is good; easy, but not primitive. It doesn’t reveal any disappointments lying ahead. It tricks you into following this spineless creature, curious of what would become of it. At some point it feels like Emma would pick up the role of the main character, but she is born too late, and by the time she reaches the age where she can lead the book to its plot, the book is already over.

It was the first time I went against my principles and didn’t drop the book when it should have been dropped. I naively thought nothing worse could happen if I read till the end. I would at least get a sense of completion, right? But how can you get a sense of completion from something that has never started?! You are left with a string on which beads were being put on. You followed the string wishing to see what it would become in the end, but it just tears abruptly midway.

The book is a set of nice details that could theoretically be assembled into a fine construction, but the main piece went missing, and now it just cannot function.