I loved the first Kate Atkinson book I read, ‘Life After Life’ finding it clever and quite spell-binding.  A friend recommended ‘God in the Ruins’ which I dropped after the first 50 pages or so finding the characters didn’t grab me, though the plot appeared to be gathering steam when I quit.  Enter, ‘Normal Rules Don’t Apply’ which I found on the new books shelf at the Cambridge Public Library.

I should have been warned when I noticed that none of the words in the title were capitalized, because the book itself, eleven stories described on the flyleaf as ‘dazzling’, failed to make it for me.  Atkinson walks that tightrope between reality and science fiction, and this book definitely leaned to the latter. The very first story, entitled ‘The Void’ introduces a weird phenomenon in which during a five minute period during the day, anyone who is outdoors suddenly drops dead.  Okay, but why and from where, and what is being done about it????

Several characters turn up in most of the stories, primarily a gray, unfinished, namby-pamby guy named Faustus Franklin Fletcher who works as a writer on a TV soap opera called Green Acres.  One rainy night in Leeds he comes upon Connie Kingshott who has just slippedon the wet pavement. Weeks later they are engaged and soon married.  Along the way we meet Connie’s strange family and Skylar Schiller, an American movie idol who almost marries Prince Alfie who becomes king when the actual King and the older son die in The Void.

Well, you get the idea.  I kept waiting for Atkinson’s wit and creativity to emerge, but no luck.  I’d skip this book if I were you. As I usually do when I do not particularly enjoy a book, I read reviews in several periodicals.  The Guardian shared my lukewarm feelings towards the book while the London Literary Times gave it a thumbs up.  The New York Times listed it among the 34  books to read this fall, so I’m guessing they’d also give it a positive review.  Two against two, so make up your own mind.  If you like fabulism or science fiction, you’ll probably like this one.