Just Like You

This was my first experience with Nick Hornby, and what a pleasant one! It made me think about major issues and laugh with Lucy's boys (for real, I want my children to be as witty as them). Although I was expecting a different ending, I really enjoyed this story. It shows that sometimes the right person takes time to fit into your life.

Enjoyable enough, but surprisingly clunky and unconvincing in its characterisation. Hornby doesn't seem sure whether he's writing a straight romance or a Brexit parable with some political point to make. One of the characters doesn't know what to think about Brexit, which is maybe a metaphor for the author's own indecisiveness on what this book should be about.

A passable but not great novel that combines Brexit with the story of a 42-year-old white mother of two who engages a 22-year-old black man who works at her local butcher shop to babysit for her boys and then the two of them become romantically involved. Complications ensue. Discussions of “when you’re 40 I’ll be 60” and “did that sound racist? I don’t mean it to be racist..do you think I’m racist?” alongside the class- or education-level assumptions about Brexit voting, tended to bog things down.

Das Buch hat den scharfsinnigen Blick, den man von Nick Hornby gewöhnt ist, und seinen Wortwitz ebenso. Er schreibt eine Geschichte, die ich noch nicht oft gelesen habe und die Figuren sind sympathisch, gut ausgearbeitet und vielfältig. Aber: Brexit, (ungewöhnliche) Beziehungen, Alltagsrassismus... es sind an einigen Stellen ein paar Themen und Botschaften zu viel. Nicht durchweg, denn dafür zeichnet er ein zu scharfes Bild der Gesellschaft, dafür sind insbesondere die Dialoge zu gut, aber immer wieder habe ich mich etwas verloren gefühlt. Vielleicht liegt das auch daran, dass der Blick auf den Brexit nun einmal der von außen ist und es sich, vier Jahre nach dem Referendum, nur noch schwer hineinfühlen lässt. Unter'm Strich bleibt aber ein Roman mit wahrem Wortwitz, Nick Hornby hat geliefert.

Light-hearted, topical. Not as good or funny as Hornby’s other books but still an easy read

Two bland people with nothing in common limp through an unwise relationship... oh and Brexit comes up every other page. It’s quite possible that I missed the point as I love Nick Hornby usually. Here though I found I cared nothing for the characters and was actually saying out loud “why are they together then” every few pages. Not one I would recommend of his sadly.

Nick Hornby is one of my automatic buy authors. That doesn’t necessarily mean I love all his books, but I love a great deal of them and like most of them. Just Like You falls closer to the latter category. Set amidst the contentious Brexit vote, Just Like You is an unlikely love story between a white middle-aged divorcee and her black babysitter, two decades younger. The Brexit stuff was interesting, but it had a very, “people are still people and we need to learn to get along” vibe that makes sense coming from the author - a 60 something year old white man – but was a little simplistic for this liberal millennial. Alternately, I did really appreciate the message this book gives about living in the moment. Many love stories like to ignore future ramifications, but in this instance it’s what made the story more realistic. If two people make each other happy, what more is there?