Hideous Kinky

I bet that title got everybody's attention! Seriously, I just finished reading Esther Freud's Hideous Kinky, and I am disappointed. It was on the list of 1001 books to read before you die (which generally has not let me down), and the blurb on the back of the novel sounded like something I would really, really like, but it didn't work for me. The narrator is a five-year old English girl who is telling of trying to exist in a "semi-normal" life while traveling to Marrakech with her hippie mother and seven-year old sister. I did not find the mother realistic in actions or thought (whether drug-induced or not), and I did not find the abilities of these two children to be  probable. It was a cute book and I did not mind reading it, but one I needed to have read before I die...afraid not!