Customer Reviews

stranger and stranger

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Have you ever met a person online? You were guarded at first, right? You thought, "Who is this person?" They could be a nutcase, or a pervert. But after a while did you start to think of them as a friend? Did things get weird? Did you start to think of them sexually?

This is a novel about exactly that kind of relationship. The author, Robert McMullen, who has some kind of mysterious illness that renders him homebound, saved all of the emails he exchanged with a woman, Rose, he met online and the majority of this book are those emails. However, they are interspersed with his own thoughts. At first these are mostly light-hearted but as the book goes on McMullen begins to share a bit of the pain he is going through do to his illness and the outlook on life it's given him.

I went back and forth, sometimes I thought Rose was insane, sometimes I thought she was normal and McMullen himself was not to be trusted.

One thing is for sure this novel was an engrossing read. [...]

Reviewer: E. Randall from Nr Haywards heath, West Sussex United Kingdom
I started reading this book in the middle, just to have a quick dip, (I know it's a bad habit of mine, along with reading the last page first) Before I realised it, I had read to the end. So then I started at the beginning and read all the way through.
This is a warm and witty account of an online relationship, all the more attractive as it gives you the slightly guilty feeling you get when you accidentally see a screen with another person's email up...and have read it before you can stop yourself. There is no polite word that I know of for this "nosiness." It can't be eavesdropping if you can't hear anything, it's not voyeurism as you can't see anything...but it fulfils the human condition that we all have to know more about what is going on around us, behind closed doors etc.
I think it's a basic survival skill, well that's my excuse anyway.
All authors feel vulnerable when they publish, but Robert McMullen has been braver than most in exposing his unadulterated emails to the world, revealing by turn his secret hopes, desires and fears, coupled with a dry sense of humour. I now have a crushing need to know what happened next to rose seventeen...
and... oh yes, I loved his hilarious description of the horrific contents of Wynema and her deep freeze...
A highly recommended read!