Matt McAvoy Book Review

This is one of those books which isn’t really about anything (though, the ending is genuinely staggering).  Set over the course of a weekend, it tells, from a multi-person viewpoint, of the everyday lives of a group of young twenty-somethings – and a few peripheral others – who appear to live for nothing but smoking weed, drinking shots and getting laid.  Despite its excellent writing, it didn’t really appeal to me; in fact, in the main, I think this book is probably more suited to an audience of twenty-somethings who are interested in smoking weed, drinking shots and getting laid.

Cassidy is a fine writer, and this book is loaded with snappy, witty dialogue and genuine laugh-out-loud moments, along with clever humour, scattered with stand-up one liners.  Unfortunately, I do feel that he lets himself down a little, and am certain that he is capable of writing much, much better content.  Not so much that there is anything particularly wrong with The Final Weekend…, but it does seem to revel in the lewd and crude.  In fact, at about midway, the author seems to make a conscious decision to take that particular quality up a notch, and that’s where it stays for the remainder of the book.  High brow this certainly isn’t; if you don’t want to read about dislikeable characters generally being dislikeable, this probably won’t be up your street.

I do get the impression that there are many more strings to Cassidy’s bow, and I do hope that he flexes them in other titles, rather than sticking to the “fun of misguided youth” formula.  I have to be honest, whilst I may not have been particularly generous with the star rating, it was actually higher than it would have been, were it not for the quality of this author.  His work is flawless; sure, there are a number of misplaced commas, which throw you from the flow a little, but overall I think this work may not be representative of Cassidy in many ways.  At the same time, herein are real glimpses of what he can do, and it is very interesting indeed.  Perhaps the book is a bit long, especially for one in which the narratives never really seem to have any objective or direction, and the viewpoints all seem to merge into one after a while; I found that later in the book I didn’t really know or care too much who was talking or about what, and was just enjoying some of the humour.  At the end, you really see a different side to Cassidy, which genuinely opens your eyes – perhaps that is the side of Cassidy I would be very keen to see a lot more of.

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