My Review of The Dangerous Kind by Deborah O'Connor

So it's coming to the end of Tracy Fenton's stupendous Blog Tour for the triumph that is The Dangerous Kind by Deborah O'Connor published by Zaffre Books. 

It's hard to know what to say that hasn't already been said by so many fantastic bloggers but here goes ...

Deborah O'Connor is the mistress of her craft and has created a disturbing and thought provoking indictment as to what society values and what society disposes of as trash. She toys with the reader through the use of multiple narrators and by moving between the past and the present. We are presented with a Dickensian plethora of characters and have the joy of trying to assess their relevance to each other, thinking we've got it right and then starting from scratch when some new piece of evidence is revealed to us. 

The premise is that 1 in 100 of us are capable of violent crime: they are The Dangerous Kind therefore if they are identified they could be stopped beforehand but by the time I finished the last page of the story I was surprised it was only one. Given the right circumstances we are all capable of being the dangerous kind, well I most certainly am. Albeit a fictional account, Deborah O'Connor uses contemporary British scandals to make the events within the story even more disturbing, we cannot pretend these things do not happen because we know that they do. I'm desperate to say more but don't want to spoil it for you...

What I can say is that women suffer the attentions of men to a greater or lesser degree, from the persistent gifts from an unwanted suitor upwards or downwards might be more apt. That is not to say that this is a story that sets out to bash men, for it is not, more that it made me reflect on what women have to put up with, and indeed are expected to be grateful for. The Dangerous Kind also made me angry about the world we live in for example: the need of women's refuges in the 21st century and the inadequacy of funding for them.

A final note: Deborah O'Connor has a gift for creating characters that the reader both cares about and believes in. I particularly loved Jessamine and her pumpkin seeds, all of the characters felt real and I invested in them wholeheartedly. As you can see The Dangerous Kind made me feel a whole gamut of emotions and I am all the better for it.