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This is an excellent book. Great story. Brilliant writing. I'm keen to read her other books now, but they're kind of hard to find.

The characters were great. It's interesting (and I didn't even think of this until just now) that both this and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant, which I read right before this, are stories about dead people, told by various different characters. They are really similar in a lot of ways. And in both, it's strange how Rant and Joss are so real, so there, even though it's just other people remembering them. I loved Millie. I loved May Hart, the old school chum, and how different what was happening in her head was from how Sophie saw it. I loved her crush on Josie and how seeing the photo made her miss her and how she was suddenly jealous of Millie. Her bit was only like three or four pages, but I loved her so much (she was maybe my favorite character!). Sophie was horrid. I mean really horrid. Reading the Sophie parts, I wanted to strangle someone (preferably Sophie). Colman was a brat, but he came round in the end. And even when he was a brat, I was still sympathetic to his sense of betrayal. I liked all the odd little characters like the undertaker and the death certificate guy. I liked Joss's mum. I loved Joss's letter at the end.

I just love this book so, so much. ( )

In a novel about the life of fictional jazz trumpeter Joss Moody we get none of the jazz scene. There is a short chapter where his long time friend and fellow musician Big Red McCall recollects the time they spent together. But the focus of this book is elsewhere and apart from the Freudian symbolism of the trumpet Joss might have well have been a nuclear scientist, a racing car driver or a professional pickpocket. I felt a bit let down by this - no jazz club scenes, smokey bars, jamming and frenetic touring.
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The novel was inspired by the true-life story of the 1930s US jazz trumpeter, Billy Tipton, who died in 1989 and was found to be a woman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Ti...
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To a large extent Joss is a peripheral figure. The story concerns the effect on other people of the revelation, on his death, that although he lived his life exclusively as a man, he was in fact a woman. The subject could be a prurient one but is actually treated entirely in a minor key. We hear from different voices; mainly from his grieving wife, Millie, who was the only person in the world to know his secret, and his foul-mouthed juvenile son Coleman. Perhaps less than credibly Coleman had no knowledge of his father's secret and is enlighted only when visiting the undertaker to view the body.
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One fine aspect of the novel is that minor characters are given meaty morsels. We hear the thoughts of the undertaker, Albert Holding, of the cleaner, Maggie, of his aged estranged mother, Edith. Coleman, naturally, enraged me. I was enormously pleased that Sophie, the tabloid journalist, was taking him for a ride; I was hoping that he would end up with none of the money and the guilt of betraying his mother's memory of Joss. More disappointment then as Sophie seems to fall for Coleman; he walks out on her and returns to Scotland presumably for a mother son reconciliation. Bleugh! Couldn't he have been hit by a bus!
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I was less enamoured by the writing which at the outset seemed pedestrian, The sentences are short and functional. The first time I got a real sense of place was in the fog that accompanied Joss' arrival in Britain. I had a sense of seeing the skeleton of the novel laid out; as though the flesh was not rich or textured enough to conceal it. This unsettling image receded a little as I got well into the book but I was still left with a residue of a, admittedly sophisticated, painting by numbers set. ( )

This one left me feeling a bit 'meh'. Although this book sets out to deal with the themes of gender and sexuality in a way that is not so commonly touched upon, some characters were more believable than others and I eventually found that I couldn't care less about any of them. Which spoilt things a bit for me. ( )