I'm a huge, huge JCO fan so it pains me to be so critical - but this is a messy book that is also increasingly predictable, a cardinal literary sin that one would never expect to apply to the fertile imagination of JCO.

The first 30% or so draws us in to one of those complicated families that inhabit the JCO universe: the voice is that of Violet Rue, the youngest girl and her father's favourite, just 12 when the book opens, 27 when it closes and from which point she is telling her tale. Without giving away spoilers, this section deals with violence and loyalty within the family, and what happens when Violet unintentionally transgresses an unspoken family code.

From then, though, this descends into a litany of woes as Violet becomes a magnet for every kind of abuser out there and it's unconvincing that she should be such a poor little (female) victim preyed upon by an ongoing series of (male) predators. That's not to say that this kind of masculine violence doesn't happen, it just feels poorly imagined and rather superficially written, almost as if these gender roles are both institutionalised and impossible to overturn. It's the 1990s, after all, and Violet is at university - her utter naivety and passivity, her complete lack of any kind of resistance just doesn't ring true no matter how toxic her experience of family was.

The last part of the book returns to Violet's family... and, yes, more violence is in store for the poor girl.. I don't know - the whole thing feels messy emotionally and structurally and lacks the depth of emotional and politicised intelligence I expect from JCO. She draws some very crude lines between racism and misogyny (yes, of course they're linked) that feel like a throwback to the 1960s or 1970s.

I would never want to dissuade anyone from reading JCO but this is far from her best...