Warm, careful, a third too long for me.

The early chapters are the good ones. The South Side flat, the upright nobody could get tuned, her father going up the stairs slowly. That's a real childhood and she writes it without polishing it.

Then she gets famous and it puts on a jacket. Everything after the campaign reads like it has been past four people. Nothing wrong with it. It's just very smooth, and smooth is hard to hold on to when the train is rattling and somebody behind you is on a work call about invoicing.

I read most of this in ten-minute pieces and I don't think that's the book's fault, exactly, but a book that assumes an armchair and a whole evening is a different animal to one that assumes you have got the length of a delay.

Six feels harsh written down, but I was reading it in the wrong shape — ten minutes at a time, standing up for half of it.