Vicki Laveau-Harvie, The Erratics.

- I'm baffled as to how this memoir won this year's Stella Prize. Out of a shortlist that included Melissa Lucashenko's powerful Too Much Lip and Maria Tumarkin's superb Axiomatic.

- It's about two old parents living near the Rockies in Alberta, Canada, and their two daughters whom they kicked out of home decades previously. Unfortunately for the reader this family is boring, and the fact that the senile parents are batshit crazy doesn’t help in the slightest. They are utterly charmless. That they’re nameless also doesn’t help. The author keeps them at an emotional distance. 

- The book simply didn’t engage me, and I would hazard a guess it won’t engage many other readers. 

- Sure, it’s written in sassy, sparkling and delightfully comic prose with an edge of cynicism and world weariness, but it’s ordinary, frankly, with little insight or depth.

- The oldest daughter (the author) is fiercely intelligent. Her dealings with carers, doctors, neighbours and others looking after her mother and father are competent and professional. Although, very frequently, she eviscerates all of them. 

- Her relationship with her younger sister is just as much in focus as her relationship with her parents. Her sister is a softy, more emotional, sentimental and anxious. Frankly, she’s annoying. The fact that she too is nameless doesn’t help. 

- The senile parents, now in their nineties, keep on living and surviving year after year, with no change in the dynamics of the family relationships - no development, no reconciliation. I'm sorry, but I found that frustrating and, again, annoying. 

- And there's the Alberta nature descriptions - endless and...annoying. There’s constant snow and ice and blizzards, and freezing temperatures. The extreme weather becomes a major character in the tale. It's off-putting. Why would anybody want to live there?

- This memoir is only 217 pages long but I couldn’t wait for it to end. It was like spending a long weekend putting up with people you just want to escape from. 

- This blurb on the back cover is a lie:

'A ferocious, sharp, darkly funny and wholly compelling memoir of families, the pain they can inflict and the legacy they leave, The Erratics has the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device - it will take your breath away'.