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    By the Time You Read This
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    By the Time You Read This
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    By the Time You Read This
    Ebook296 pages4 hours

    By the Time You Read This

    By Lola Jaye

    3.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    The smash hit debut novel for this summer

    This is my (Kevin Bates) manual for my daughter Lois. The love of my life.
    Rules of the manual:
    1.You must only read each new entry on your birthday
    2.This is a private manual between you and me.
    3.No peeping at the next entry unless it's your birthday!

    When Lois Bates is handed the manual, she can barely bring herself to read it as the pain of her dad’s death is still so raw.Yet soon Kevin’s advice is guiding her through every stage of her life – from jobs to first loves and relationships.

    The manual can never be a substitute for having her dad back, but through his words Lois learns to start living again, and finds that happiness is waiting round the corner …

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateSep 4, 2008
    ISBN9780007287642
    Unavailable
    By the Time You Read This
    Author

    Lola Jaye

    Lola Jaye was born and raised in London, England, where she still makes her home; she has also lived briefly in Nigeria. By the Time You Read This—Lola's first U.S. novel—was published by HarperCollins in 2009. Her inspirational essay "Reaching for the Stars: How You Can Make Your Dreams Come True," in which she charted her journey from foster child to author, was released in 2009 as part of the U.K.'s wildly popular Quick Reads program.

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    Reviews for By the Time You Read This

    3.5/5

    38 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I liked the idea behind this book but there was something that bothered me about the story. I didn't like how The Manual seemed to almost predict what was going to happen in Lois's life. It made the story feel too unrealistic for me. I think if The Manual wasn't so close to what was actually happening to her, it would have felt more real for me. Other than that, I really enjoyed the story and was very happy with how everything turned out for Lois in the end.
    • 3/5
      The premise of the story held a lot of promise - father dies young but leaves behind a notebook full of letters to his daughter. Unfortunately, the execution of the story just wasn't quite what it could have been. Despite a mother who loves her and people around her to care for her, Lois refuses to get close to anyone - the result of losing her father at five. She continues this pattern WAY past the time when she should have begun to mature out of this. The story is told from Lois' viewpoint and it is faulty, so the reader has to imagine what the other characters are really like. As a first novel, it is pretty good, but I look forward to seeing what Ms. Jaye can do as she continues her writing.
    • 3/5
      By the Time You Read This by Lola JayeSally ApollonOverall Score: 7.5 out of 10It’s strange that I chose a second book in succession with two separate narratives ongoing…anyhow; it was not my intention and of course it served a different purpose here. But in comparison, it was an effective device for building the two characters of Father & Daughter. One result of this method was that as the book neared it’s end I found that I had the same feeling of “not wanting the book to end” that Lois in her late 20s was experiencing. To her it represented a repetition of loss and I could keenly sense that. Lois was an interesting teenage girl, and I found it intriguing to see her grow into a well-defended (emotionally) young woman. By this, I mean that she had many characteristics that enabled her to not get too close to anyone, it really wasn’t difficult to see, from our perspective that she had built these defenses because of the deep loss (abandonment) that she felt by her father’s death. She had a deep sense of inadequacy, that her mother didn’t seem to do much to address, (indeed she often made it worse) which to me accounted for her willingness to put up with any amount of bad behaviour towards her from Carla. It also prevented her from pushing harder for a relationship with Corey, who she clearly adored; but was so well-defended she wouldn’t even admit it to herself. Her unwillingness to be vulnerable seemed to underline her succession of disastrous relationships. I have to ask myself the question: was “The Manual” really useful to her?? I think the great irony of the book is that only once she finishes the Manual does she really begin to start living life—as life can really only be learned by living, not by a long list of “do’s & don’t’s”. So, ironically, her Father actually prevented her from growing up, by engendering an artificial dependence on his flawed “wisdom”. She failed to see him as human and fallible—rudely exposed as such finally by her mother. It was also ironic to me that for all her father’s earnest urging otherwise, she was truly unable to forgive her mother for loving a man other than her “perfect” father, until her father’s Manual was done and her mother had to hit her with a hefty reality check. Lois was unable even to refer to her step-father (“Bingo-caller”) by his real name or try to build a friendship with him. I would expect this from a teenage girl, but a young woman in her mid-twenties…I would expect a little more of. Her blindness to her own defensiveness also prevented her from building a better relationship with her sister, (Abbi)—this really was selfish of her; however, I do think it was a realistic account of someone in her situation and, to her credit, she did notice and try to rectify this.I also have to say a word or two about Lois’s career—it was almost a character itself! It was interesting to me how she determinedly grew her career, making opportunistic moves and how her IT career died a death with the collapse of the ecomony and her well-defended psyche. It was a huge relief to see her find creative outlet and commercial-career success in one swoop with the redirection of her talents into photography. I was jealous! To make a major career transition like that is a huge leap of faith—or a lucky act of a desperate woman. Oh and I have to say that when I got the book, I thought the fact that she was biracial would figure into the story in some way, as in bullied or discriminated against…and I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that it didn’t. It was just an incidental fact of life for her and not really one in a long list of woes, or reason for her to feel worse about anything—you can imagine that this was noticeable to me. Overall, I really liked it, it was pleasantly readable, moving at times & I did celebrate her triumphs with her. I really wanted her to do well, if I must fault it the ending came pretty quickly & the ends all got tied up a little too neatly…but that’s fiction for you isn’t it?