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Update: So as this mess was inexplicably left off the Booker shortlist, my prediction of it winning, is now obsolete... so let's pledge our allegiance to my #12th ranked of all 13 read ... and all hail Girl, Woman, Other!

Spoilers ahead - do not read unless you've already read the book, or don't care about such.

It won't surprise people who know how much I detested Porter's first dull book (and also the execrable and boring Reservoir 13, to which it bears more than a passing resemblance), that this also wasn't my cuppa. I had successfully avoided reading it until it made the Booker longlist, but then, as a completest, I had to succumb.

The incomprehensible verbiage and playful graphics for the beginning Papa Dead Tweewort ... err, Toothwort sections (surely a desperate sign of lack of imagination - 'yeah, it's stupid, but putting it in fanciful font may make people believe something extraordinary is going on here') almost caused me to bail immediately, but I persevered.

Then, still early on, we get 3 or 4 pages of grisly detail of the demented mother ruthlessly killing a poor trapped hedgehog (even though she herself SAYS she could have easily called the RSPCA to rescue it), so once again I nearly abandoned this mess, since animal cruelty is anathema to me. But I figured that even though it was twice as long as Porter's 'Grief is...', this still seemed a fast read, and I could get it over with quickly.

So imagine my glee when towards the end, little Lanny (a 'special' child, another overused trope that makes me throw up a little in my mouth) gets trapped in a sewer grate, comparable to the one his wretched mother decided to make that hedgehog's place of final massacre... and Green Man manqué Papa Dead is standing over it ...and I clapped thinking ...a ha!!! the forces of nature will teach that vile woman a lesson, and Papa will repeatedly stab Lanny into little pieces and flush him down the drain as the mother watches in horror! THAT ending would have made this a 5 star read!! (Or maybe I just need to stop watching movies like Wicker Man and Midsommar!) Alas, we get the safe and expected sentimental gloopy ending.

[Perhaps if Porter had a shred of originality, he would have turned the ending into a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' story - other MUCH better alternative endings: B. Since Mama Jolie writes gruesome murder mysteries, we discover that the whole hedgehog episode was in reality a psychotic breakdown ... and she actually killed Lanny, not a hedgehog, and flushed him down the sewer. C. Porn addicted dad Robert, who never cared about the little bugger anyway, is found to have traded Lanny to white slavers, as half the village suspects, in exchange for a harem girl he keeps locked up in the basement and violates in the company of Papa D. D. Suspected paedo Mad Pete, the only one who cares about Lanny and realizes his parents are total shitheads, ferrets the tyke out of the weird village and gets him adopted by decent folk who enroll him in a prestigious London art school ... and we learn in a coda he grew up and became a success under his adopted name of .... Damian Hirst!]

But fans of this can rejoice that - strictly due to my loathing of it - it will no doubt make the Booker shortlist ... and probably walk away with the prize. :-)