Unfortunately all the worst things just keeps happening to poor awful Eleanor, including getting cancer. What's a horrible person like Eleanor to do? Well, move to a remote town and start over, except Eleanor is not just horrible she is exceptionally horrible. She is snarky and nasty to almost everyone she meets including children(But that's what make it so FUNNY!). Eleanor is bitter about everything. She purposefully creates problems in order to complain about them. The entire story is focused on Eleanor. The most unrelenting, annoying, abrasive person in the book. Let that sink in for a moment. Some interesting things do occur, but they don't really amount to anything. These random occurrences do not offer anything but a distraction from the emptiness of the plot. People exist. Things happen. The End. ( )

The Bus on Thursday by Shirley Barrett was a perfect choice for my October theme of “Dark and Disturbing” books. This will be a book that I will be mulling over for some time as I found it shocking, baffling and strangely funny. Set in a small town in Australia and dealing with a lot of crazy, this is a book that defies description.

Eleanor, a cancer survivor, comes to the small town of Talbingo to take over the teaching position as the previous teacher has mysteriously disappeared. Eleanor is not a very likeable person and indeed, she doesn’t seem to hold a candle to the beloved previous teacher, yet the people of the town are so strange that one can’t help but have a certain amount of empathy for her. The local priest attempts to exorcise her, calling her cancer a demon, one of her pupils, fourteen year old Ryan, seems obsessed with staring at her breasts or touching her in inappropriate places, she gets involved with Ryan’s very strange older brother, who seduces her and then declares her a slut. Meanwhile there is a rickety old bus that hovers around the town that Eleanor is convinced is a ghostly apparition.

While the beginning of the book certainly drew me in, I did find that it got more and more confusing toward the end. I truly couldn’t tell if Eleanor is possessed, mad or perhaps the only sane person in the book. The Bus on Thursday seems to be part rom-com, part horror but always darkly humorous and more than a little strange. This was a great book to spend time with on a dark October evening. ( )

I see there's been a few negative reviews on here. It's the unreliable narrator that readers appear to have trouble with.

I thought it was a brilliant first-person account of someone really going off the rails. The MC, Eleanor Mellett, begins with an account of a bout with breast cancer and a bad breakup. She moves to a new venue to teach school and find a new start in her life. And then things get strange. I mean really strange.

Because it's written in such a close and myopic point of view, we the reader can only see what she sees, feels, hears. She's losing her mind over a disturbing litany of events, so it can be confusing to try and make out exactly what's going on. Especially the ending (No spoilers here). It's like reading a personal journal of someone who is at wit's end; frustrated, darkly comic, exasperated. Don't expect perfect clarity.

This kind of writing is not easy to pull off. But I enjoyed it thoroughly. ( )

This was a weird book and I can’t decide what I thought of it....

A few days later...

‘The Bus on Thursday’ is a blackly comic take of weird goings on in a small town. As with some of the best stories, it’s often unclear whether the events are actually happening or the narrator is just losing her mind. She (Eleanor) is what makes the book. A bitter, caustic breast cancer survivor who travels to a small rural town to start teaching at the primary school she the original teacher disappears. Her view of the world is often extremely funny and her reactions to the events that happen around her is brilliant.
This is in many ways a comedy of manners, with Eleanor’s increasingly erratic behaviour in sharp contrast to the sedate townspeople. It’s a surreal and very funny book, with the weirdness gradually ramping up as it progresses. It’s deliberately ambiguous a lot of the time, which I like but I know some don’t. A few days after finishing it I’m still thinking about elements of it, which for me is the sign of a good read. ( )

Very odd little book. I enjoyed the beginning much more than the end. ( )