Sex and Stravinsky

Sex and Stravinsky
By: Barbara Trapido

Outer back cover: The time is 1995, but everybody has a past. Brilliant Australian Caroline can command everyone except her own ghoulish mother, which means that things aren't easy for Josh and Zoe, her husband with Stravinsky glasses and twelve-year-old daughter. Zoe reads girls' ballet books and longs for lessons; a thing denied her until a chance encounter on a school French exchange. Meanwhile, on the east coast of Africa, Hattie, Josh's first love, now writes girls' ballet books - that's when she can carve out the space between her husband and her crosspatch daughter. From far and wide they are all drawn together: a masquerade in which things are not always what the seem.

I quite liked this book.

The book is about two families and all the ways they are intertwined and has been for over 20 years.

Each chapter is about a different person in one of the families. It can get a bit confusing at tims because of all the names and that they jump back and forth in time a lot. Each chapter is also very long. But at least all the questions that might pop into your head as you read gets answered by the end. In some ways the book is very predictable, but then suddenly something happens that you hadn't even thought of.

The book is set mainly in Britain and Africa, but as the places weren't described in much detail or anything, it didn't really make me want to go to any of the places in the book, except for Milan, but I already want to go there.

I liked most of the characters in the book, although I wish I was like Caroline, the aussie girl that could do absolutely everything, domestic goddess and super at DIY. the teenagers in the book was a bit over the top, but so are real teenagers.

I did read the book quite quickly, and although it was quite gripping in some places, my main reason for reading it so fast was because I have now reached my goal of reading 50 books this year.