Like Philippe Claudel’s Brodeck’s Report, I would never have chosen this book were it not for the Not the TV Book Group. Unlike the Claudel, though, I wasn’t bowled over by The Girl with the Glass Feet by Ali Shaw.

That’s not to say that I thought it was a bad book. On the contrary, Shaw’s writing is very good indeed. His tone, his insight into the characters and their inner lives, his dialogue; it was all very good, and I genuinely think he is One to Watch. In that sense, I’m really pleased that Simon chose the novel for our book group. The thing that prevented me from fully engaging in it was its magical realism.

The Girl with the Glass Feet is about Ida Maclaird, who visits the remote archipelago St Hauda’s Land. She meets the mysterious Henry Fuwa, who shows her his winged cattle, then heads back to the mainland. After a while, though, she notices something very odd indeed. She’s turning into glass.

So, back to St Hauda’s Land she goes, staying with a family friend who lives there, and tried to track down Henry Fuwa to see if he can explain what is happening to her, and to find out if there is a cure. Instead she meets the sweet but socially awkward and emotional baggage-laden Midas Crook, who can only really relate to the world around if there is a camera lens between him and it. Being an archipelago, everyone knows everyone, and soon intricate webs of relationships are revealed, dark secrets are uncovered, and old wounds gape open. Ida, it is revealed, isn’t the first person to start gradually turning to glass, but is there a cure?

For me, and I stress this is my own completely subjective opinion, the whole turning to glass thing (along with those tiny cows with wings) actually detracted from what I could have loved about the novel. I’m a character person. I like novels that delve into relationships and tease out people’s motivations and fears and quirks. The magical realism elements distracted me though. Why the tiny moth cattle? Are they symbolic of something? What am I missing? Glass… that must mean something. Why glass? Is it the light? Is it linked to the light that Midas is seeking with his camera on the first page? What I really wanted to be thinking about was the complex relationship between Midas and his father, who committed suicide, or the relationship between Henry Fuwa and Midas’s mother (they had an affair, of sorts), or the developing relationship between Midas and Ida herself.

The other thing I noticed was that all the women in the book were physically compromised in some way – Ida and her glassiness, Midas’s mother and her post-jellyfish-sting limp, Catherine’s death (before the novel opens) in the mountains – while the men all seemed emotionally weak. Was that on purpose? Is it that those people can only be complete when brought together, the women with the inner strength and the men with the outer?

But I am perhaps being unfair by talking about what I didn’t like about the novel. The major thing that I loved was the setting. There was some debate during the discussion about where St Hauda’s Land actually was because like all good fairy tales it is that beguiling mixture of the recognisable and the ungraspable. My heart told me it was off the north west coast of Scotland. The rugged landscape felt like the landscape I remember from home, the surname Maclaird sounded Scottish, there was just an atmosphere of Scottishness about it. Something about the coast and the hills and the pools of water. Others, though, thought it might have been Scandinavian, others Irish, others Canadian. I suppose there is a certain amount of parity between all of those places, but I was intrigued by how we all had our own ideas.

The ending, too, worked for me. Without giving too much away, there was an openess about it that allows us as readers to come to our own conclusions. This element of trust by the author is heartening, and I thank him for it.

So, not my favourite book ever, but certainly not a bad book. Ali Shaw is an excellent writer, full of promise. I, in the end, just wasn’t the right reader for his work.