1."The Accidental" is about "a skillful freeloader who lived by charming her way into people's houses.

" The
year is 2003, and thirtyish Amber MacDonald barges into a rented summer home in Norfolk, England. The inhabitants of the house are the Smarts, including twelve-year old Astrid, seventeen year-old Magnus, their forty-two year-old mother, Eve, and their stepfather, Michael. They all have a facade that they present to the world, but underneath, each one lives a secret inner life. Amber, who is a beautiful woman with a forceful and charismatic personality and a huge dose of chutzpah, manages to hurl an emotional depth charge at the Smart family, exploding their complacency and leaving them changed forever. The characters in "The Accidental" are beautifully delineated and fully realized. Michael, the English professor, is pretentious and pedantic, and he engages in serial liaisons with his willing female students. Eve is a blocked writer who is terrified that she will not be able to produce another installment in her popular series. She no longer relates to her children, whose behavior has become incomprehensible to her. For some reason, Magnus is surly and depressed and Astrid is cheeky and obnoxious. When Amber comes along, Magnus and Astrid are immediately besotted with this beautiful sorceress, and they start behaving like civilized human beings. It is obvious to everyone that Michael would love to have an affair with Amber, and Eve's enchantment quickly gives way to suspicion and resentment. What does this aggressive interloper really want from them? Smith is a creative and challenging writer, whose unusual style may annoy some readers. She is in love with puns and wordplay and she mixes and matches literary styles. There are long passages written in the third person, in which an omniscient narrator delves into each person's random thoughts. There are also a few sonnets, many sentence fragments, and, of course, no quotation marks. The descriptive writing is, at times, magnificent. Astrid, who is on the verge of adolescence, is "kicky and impatient, blind as a kitten stupefied by all the knowing and the not-knowing." She is "totally unaware that the future had its gunsight trained directly on her." Amber "lit the world, took the world, made it, and after her everything in it faded." Ali Smith explores the elusive nature of truth, the various roles that people adopt to get what they want, the fragility of interpersonal relationships, and how chance, in a short time, can alter a person's entire existence. "The Accidental" is engrossing, disconcerting, daring, and mesmerizing.

2.One might almost call this "Touched by an Angel." An enigmatic young woman, Amber -- free-sprited,
unpredictable -- attaches herself to a dysfunctional English family on holiday in Norfolk, and quickly forms a special relationship with each member of it, seeing into and eventually unknotting their various obsessions. The twelve-year-old daughter is obsessed with her video camera, the teenage son with his guilt in the suicide of a schoolmate, the English professor stepfather with his beddable students, and the driven mother with her career as a writer of creative non-fiction. Although the things that Amber does are far from angelic, ranging from larceny to assault, her presence catalyzes a change for the better in each of the characters, that continues to develop even after she has moved on. Smith's writing is lively and audacious, but its apparent informality conceals a careful texture of references and reminiscences. She is excellent at capturing the voices of each of the four family members, even writing a section for the father as a tour-de-force sonnet sequence. At times the pattern seems a little too predictable, but Smith keeps some surprises up her sleeve --- none less than the surprising ending which wraps the book up neatly in narrative terms, if not quite so pleasingly in human ones. I seem to have read a lot of books lately based on what one might charitably call non-nuclear families, and narrated at least partly in the voice of one of the children. THE ACCIDENTAL is a fine example of the genre, but not the best of them; I would award that title to Myla Goldberg's superb BEE SEASON. Other books of this kind that might appeal to readers of THE ACCIDENTAL are, in an English or Irish context: MJ Hyland's CARRY ME DOWN, David Mitchell's BLACK SWAN GREEN, Kate Atkinson's family saga BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, and Mark Haddon's very special special case: THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME. Zadie Smith transports the genre to American shores in ON BEAUTY, where Jonathan Safran Foer uses the quirkier elements of it in EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, and Nicole Krauss develops the lyrical side in THE HISTORY OF LOVE. Finally Marisha Pessl's SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS, though written through the eyes of a more mature character,

also explores the power of a mysterious and charismatic outsider to affect (not necessarily for the best) the life of a growing child. Few of these books are perfect, and THE ACCIDENTAL isn't either, but any reader who enjoyed one of them would probably find much to admire in the others.

3.It's rare that a book excites me so much at the start only to utterly disappoint me by the end. Usually
the gap is not so great--either the beginning quickly informs me this will not be a book for me, or the book begins a slow gradual decline from a not-so-great height. The Accidental begins strongly--in the first 50-100 pages I thought this would be the best book I've read lately, one I'd excitedly recommend to my wife's book club as offering up a full meal of potential discussion both on the writing and on the characters. I'm almost always a sucker for multiple points-of-view, and while not all of the voices struck me equally effectively, the various stream of conscious p-o-v's here (the Smart family--husband Michael, wife Eve, 12-yr-old girl Astrid, 17-yr-old son Magnus--along with the catalyst "stranger" Amber who arrives to roil things) were distinctively enjoyable and at times powerful. The movement from each to each was handled smoothly and there was a fine pleasure in seeing the same events through the prism of their differing mindsets. The characters themselves were somewhat varied. Magnus, depressed to the near point of suicide over his involvement in an actual suicide, struck me the strongest--his repetitive obsession over his actions and their fatal results (his voice somewhat reminiscent of Quentin Compson) bearing down powerfully on the reader. And his math-ridden language freshly appealing. Astrid was not quite as strong and I have to admit the whole young, angst-ridden teen seeing things/life through the eyes of a camcorder is wearing a bit thin on me lately, but her voice carried me past my original annoyance. Michael, playing the role of the cliched professor-sleeping-with-his-students unfortunately is somewhat limited by the role, though what becomes more interesting is his slow recognition of it. Eve, a writer of semi-popular fictionalized and hypothetical biographies of long-dead people I found the least interesting at the start and through most of the book. And finally there's Amber herself, who shows up one day unexpected and becomes the blank slate the Smarts all throw their various needs/desires upon. As mentioned, the technique of multiple pov's works well to introduce each of the characters and draw the reader into their lives. Ali does a great job with the individual voices and manages some beautiful language across their various styles. Eventually, though, the characters became less interesting (the plot was never much to begin with) and this doomed the book for me despite the pleasures of technique. Magnus' use of math felt less and less fresh and more forced and expected and his focus on sex pulled his story too much into the realm of the mundane for me, losing the power of his original "sin". Astrid I eventually simply didn't care much about, as became true as well for Eve. Michael's slow change was interesting, and his linguistic movement into poetic form, while certainly a gimmick, was also effective, both in its writing and its characterization. By the last third of the book I actually didn't care much at all what happened to these people and the feeling only strengthened (if one can say that about apathy) until the finish. While it left me severely disappointed, I'd still recommend the book for its strong opening and let those who don't find its pleasure to dissipate enjoy it all the way through--there's obviously a lot who didn't based on its awards and nominations. But for those who begin it and find themselves halfway through thinking they've gotten what they could out of technique/style and don't care much for the plot or characters, then feel free to lay it down and start something else. Weakly recommended, though with sadness.

4.I honestly fail to see what there is to praise in this book. Perhaps my mind was conditioned by reading
James, Conrad, Tolstoy and Sinclair before I read The Accidental. The structure is that of episodes in the life of five people, four in one family and that of a strange vagabond. The author attempts to use a stream of conciousness style in the third person detached from the first person featured in the particular chapter. The resulting prose is quite anemic, written on a Junior High School level and rambling at times. I have also found that the quality of the prose is inversely proportional to the use of foul language and references

to current events and pop culture. I find the sheer bulk of such references annoying and only serve to leave the text unintellegable to readers of future generations who are unfamiliar with such references. The character development is also weak. If you enjoy the rambling thoughts of people with Borderline personalities you will not be disappointed. There are no real relationships established and the cahracters are without depth and one cares less for them than they do for each other. The idea or premise of the story is novel and had a great potential. In the hands of a Faulkner or James it may have been the stuff of a masterpiece. But above all, a good book should be well written with prose that captivates, transports the imagination into the author's creation and is finely crafted. Literary gimicks just don't cut the mustard.

5."The Accidental" by first-time Scottish novelist Ali Smith has to be one of the most irritating books I've
read in a very long time. It's so modern, it's really hard to tell what happened or why you should care about it. This book won the Whitbread Novel Award. According to another website, the Whitbread Award lost its sponsor and ceased to exist the same year. Would it be fair to label this book as the one that killed the Whitbread Award? The jacket also labels this book as a finalist for the Man Booker Prize whose website says that they award "the very best in contemporary fiction." For me a requirement of the very best fiction is to be able to affect the reader in a positive way. My only positive is that I finally got to the end of a dreadful book; & no, it did not get better. Eve Smart is a novelist. I usually try to avoid books where writers write about writers. It's like a movie about movie stars or a song about songwriting -- it seems quintessentially self-indulgent. Who knows what happens to Eve at the end of the book? Why is she in some lady's house near the Grand Canyon? Is it just to present another character as irritatingly self-absorbed as the main character? Why is Eve unconcerned about her children? Why does she see her dead mother floating above the Grand Canyon when this wasn't a book about her parents? Wouldn't it have been more interesting to have her be eaten by a mountain lion? Michael is Eve's husband. He's a university professor that sleeps with his students. His wife Eve knows and doesn't care. Are they progressive people because they sleep around? Is this supposed to make us care about them? What is the effect of their loose behavior on their two children? Do we care or applaud when Michael gets fired? Astrid is the youngest child. She is going through typical adolescent behaviors. Yes, she is one of the most real of the characters, but she doesn't change throughout the book. She gets mad at her mother for not being home and refuses to speak to Eve when she calls on the phone. Astrid was right to be mad at Eve, but so what? Magnus, the son, was the most interesting character to me simply because he loses his virginity in a church. It's a bit of a mixed message from author Ali Smith. What does it say about the church? Is the message that "The Accidental" is man because there is no God proved because the church is empty? Who knows? Amber shows up as the family summers in Suffolk or Norfolk as Eve tries to write. She buddies up with Astrid smashing her expensive camera. She has sex with Magnus. She insults Eve and gives her a knee massage. She kisses Eve on the lips, right before Eve leaves for the Grand Canyon. She ignores Michael. Who is Amber? Why is she in the book? Magnus tells Astrid he knows who Amber is after she's disappeared, but Smith fails to let the readers know. Is this a puzzle? An illusion? A nightmare? Then when the family returns home, their house has been completely stripped. Who did that? What's the point? I did not care for Smith's repetitious use of pages of short sentences. It doesn't further the story. It basically just says, "Look at me. I can write in short sentences." However, it was enough to have her awarded the Whitbread Novel Award. I didn't mind the poetry. I liked it because I could get through the book faster. To what point it was there, I cannot say. Perhaps you will be more modern than I and not particularly care if a story makes sense or whether there is anybody about which to care. For me, this is an award-winning dud. Taxi!

6.Ali Smith's writing is astonishing. She has a knack for quirky humor and engrossing wordplay. In her
novel THE ACCIDENTAL, for instance, one of Smith's characters (Amber) describes her childhood: "But my father was Alfie, my mother was Isadora. I was unnaturally psychic in my teens, I made a boy fall off his bike and I burned down a whole school. My mother was crazy, she was in love with God. There I was at the altar about to marry someone else when my boyfriend hammered on the church glass at the back and we eloped together on a bus. My mother was furious. She'd slept with him too. The devil got me pregnant and a satanic sect made me go through with it. Then I fell in with a couple of outlaws and did me some talking to the sun. I said I didn't like the way he got things done. I had sex in the back of the old closing cinema. I used butter in Paris. I had a farm in Africa. I took off my clothes in the window of an apartment building and distracted the two police inspectors from watching for the madman on the roof who was trying to shoot the priest. I fell for an Italian. It was his moves on the dancefloor that did it. I knew what love meant. It meant never having to say you're sorry. It meant the man who drove the taxi would kill the presidential candidate, or the pimp. It was soft as an easy chair" (pp. 104-105). When it was published in 2004, not surprisingly, THE ACCIDENTAL was shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize and won the 2005 Whitbread Novel of the Year award. The novel tells the non-linear story (told through the shifting mental perspectives of each character) of a blonde, free-spirited, thirtysomething woman (Amber), who unexpectedly disrupts the Smart family vacation in Norfolk, England by seducing each family member with her psychological manipulations. If you believe the Smarts, Amber is "a charlatan and a trickster and a liar" (p. 230). Astrid Smart is a 12-yearold who sees the world through the lens of her video camera. To her, Amber is a hero who throws her camera from a highway overpass. Magnus Smart is Astrid's guilt-racked 17-year-old brother, who believes he killed a classmate with a humiliating e-mail. To him, Amber is an angel who not only saves him from his despair, but who also awakens his sexuality. Their mother, Eve Smart, is a writer suffering from writer's block, who believes Amber is her womanizing husband's latest conquest. Michael Smart is a University professor, who assumes Amber is his wife's friend. When Amber just as abruptly disappears from their lives (as the US war in Iraq is escalating), the Smarts have discovered that, while they can take a vacation from the shadows of the world they have been calling life, it takes an "accidental" encounter with Amber to jolt them from that life. Smith suggests the Smarts are like the "group of men" in Plato's cave, who mistake the shadows of the cave for the world, and Amber is like the one who wandered outside the cave to discover the sunlight of the real world (p. 249). Highly recommended

7.Surprise and chance have a way of intrusively wedging a new perspective into people's lives. The four
members of the Smart family seem in particular need of just such an unexpected element during their holiday in the Norfolk countryside. All of them are on the brink of a major crisis in their lives, but most of them are carefully avoiding the reality of their situations. At their idyllic getaway which the daughter Astrid views as an "unhygienic dump" they receive an unexpected visitor who brashly delivers a new point of view. From beginning, middle to end they are shaken into a new understanding of the world. This is an intelligent, carefully structured novel that is both funny and illuminating. A chance trip to watch the movie Love Actually leads Magnus, the confused young son of the family to ruminate on Plato's ideas about Belief and Illusion. Ali Smith is able to incorporate myth and philosophy into her wry look at ordinary modern life in a way that produces an entirely fresh way of seeing. From the minute details of life to the war in Iraq playing in the background, the methods we use to understand things are exposed and questioned. Whether seeing reality through the filter of Astrid's camera lens or the mathematical equations of Magnus, the way we view the world is scrupulously examined. But the characters have a sense that truth is still hidden from them leading them to use new tools to examine it. Ali Smith bravely experiments with language and the form of the novel to re-view life. If her technique is viewed by some as placing literary panache over essential meaning then Smith seems to answer this through her character the novelist Eve who responds, "It's not a gimmick. Every question has an answer." Smith cleverly constructs different paths to bring us to new answers.