Book Review: Expectation
03/09/2020
Book Review | Expectation by Anna Hope
OK, first up, I have to admit that I’m probably the ideal reader for this novel. It’s written by an actress who trained at RADA and then became a novelist. The novel focuses on the story of three women, their friendships and how their lives and relationships change over a decade. This hits A LOT of points for me. I worked briefly as an actress for a few years (and still sometimes hanker after performing), I’m now a playwright, theatre fan and book obsessive who is particularly fond of reading novels that span a number of years and follow characters through their lifetimes, all the better if they’re chock full of relatable female characters. So, yeah, she’s reaching her target market here.
The central question of the book, and actually the thing that most drew me in, was in the title Expectation, ‘what happens when we don’t fulfil our own expectations of ourselves?’ I’m a women in her early thirties and typically I’m currently wading around in a mire of my own thwarted expectations with the same questions going through my brain on a loop: Are my Expectations of myself fair? What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? What can I do to make things better? How can I be who I believed I would be? Are my family proud of me? Am I failing at life? And so on. I’ve played with the idea a little in my own writing but this was the first time that it was the central question of a novel rather than just the state of mind of one character.
The story is told from the perspective of three friends - Lissa, Cate and Hannah - and switches back and forward in time from their shared past to their fractured present. (Yet another point on which this novel felt tailor made for me was that it switched between Manchester, London and Canterbury - all places that I’ve lived or spent a lot of time in.) Over the course of the novel the history of the friendships are unfurled, from first meetings to sharing a house in London, and the pace is perfect, filling in the gaps for the reader, fleshing out the relationships, explaining certain behaviours or built up grudges between the three. This honestly felt to me like a book only a woman could write. I have read and loved books by many male authors writing female characters that I find totally believable, but in Expectation it was the small details and unspoken sentiments that were the most relatable to me. I feel that these difficult to explain tensions and links between women are likely as alien to men as any of the nuances of male friendship are to me.
In the current day we find Cate living with a new husband and baby in Canterbury, struggling to cope and desperately rehashing memories of a past relationship. Hannah and Lissa are both still in London, Hannah and her husband Nate are struggling to conceive while Lissa is still chasing her dreams of an acting career. Everyone has something someone else wants and no-one is satisfied. Over the course of the book, as desperation at the course their lives are taking mounts, their loyalties to each other are tested. There’s so much I loved about this novel: the structure, the independent yet flawed female characters, the exploration of each character’s relationship with their own and each other’s mothers and the gorgeous depiction of theatre rehearsals and performances that made me long to be an actor all over again.
There were however a few aspects of it that disappointed me a little. It didn’t stop me loving and recommending the novel but I did feel a little unsatisfied. Without spoilers I’ll just say that I found some of Lissa’s actions impossible to understand to the degree that it fractured the experience of reading the novel for me and I also struggled to see Cate as as fully fleshed out a character compared to the other two. I think that Expectation tries to pack in so much story in a relatively slim novel that ultimately I sometimes felt a little short-changed, that there were things left unsaid and problems left untackled. There’s a huge jump in time at the end of the story and I think I would have been happy to read for longer and experience the story unravel a little more. If I was to do a star rating, these were the things that would have brought the reading experience down from a five star to a four star for me.
All the above having been said I’d certainly recommend Expectation. It hit so many important points for me in quite an emotive way and for that reason I think it’s a fantastic read that many other women may find cathartic. I noted recently in a couple of reviews that there are books about women where the very fact of them being women is laid out over and over again with commentary about the ways in which that affects their lives negatively. It’s such a patronising and off-putting aspect of a novel for me and Anna Hope doesn’t do that at all in this book. Instead she simply lays these women’s lives out for you and lets you, the reader, experience it alongside them.