There are a million stories in the world. Most are perfectly ordinary.
This one… isn’t.
Hannah Green actually thinks her story is more mundane than most. But she’s about to discover that the shadows in her life have been hiding a world where nothing is as it seems: that there’s an ancient and secret machine that converts evil deeds into energy, that some mushrooms can talk — and that her grandfather has been friends with the Devil for over a hundred and fifty years, and now they need her help.

‘Hannah Green And Her Unfeasibly Mundane Existence‘ has been sitting on my shelves since 2018. I can no longer remember why I bought it, I plucked it out of my TBR pile because it seemed to be a quirky mix of a Young Adult premise and darker adult storytelling. I knew it might not work for me but at least it wouldn’t be sitting neglected any longer.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the opening chapters of the book. I wondered if I’d made a mistake and that this really was a children’s book. but one vengeful death and one marriage break up later I realised that the children’s story wrapping was a disguise to keep the reader off balance.

The storytelling style was flamboyant – like a cross between a Carnival Barker pulling marks into a freakshow tent and the narrator in a pantomine.I kept reading because, beneath the let-me-tell-you-a-story style, the content was often clever, witty and slyly truthful.

Just over a third of the way through the book, I decided to set it aside. I continued to like Hannah’s precocious perspicacity and her dauntless desire to see the truth of things. I quite liked her grandad, strange though he was. I discovered that I had no sympathy for the Devil and I wasn’t convinced that the Devil Hannah and her grandfather know was likely to be any better than whatever or whoever was trying to replace him. That sapped some of the energy from the story, which is all about Hannah helping the Devil. Once that happened the over-blown ‘I’m telling you a grand tale’ storytelling style started to be too irritating for me to live with.

Your experience may be different from mine Click on the Soundcloud link below and see if the storytelling style works for you.