Blueeyedboy: the second in a trilogy of dark, chilling and witty psychological thrillers from bestselling author Joanne Harris

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http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff-nation/i-ve-just-finished-reading/7721723/I-ve-just-finished-reading-Blue-Eyed-Boy I don’t think of the process of writing as creation,” she muses. “To me it’s much more like method acting. I nearly always write in the first person, so the more I know about the characters the better I am at writing them. I have to work out a lot about their past.

To sum up: blueeyedboy is not a bad book, it is a different book than I am used to from Harris. There were parts of the book that I really enjoyed and felt that I was getting into, but unfortunately they were outweighed by the parts that were dark and cynical and uncomfortable to me. I do believe that this may have been the point of the book – afterall, can we really believe anything we read on the internet? No, necessarily – we can be anyone we want on the internet; we can invent a whole new persona. It’s just that for me, as a reader, it felt too chaotic, and too much dark with not enough light.The synaesthesia aspect was fascinating, it's not something I'd really heard of before, so was very interested in that, and hope to read more of it again! I started wanting to write about a dysfunctional family; one where there’s never really been a father figure,” says Harris. “And I wanted to start with the relationship between a man and his mother.” At 45, Joanne remains an enigma. With her short cropped hair, air of certainty and her no-nonsense manner, this Yorkshire woman comes across as straight-laced. When she tells me she had her entire future mapped out at 16 – a Cambridge degree, followed by teaching until she could afford to write full-time – I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Even so, Harris admits to sharing some of her anti-hero’s darker sensibilities – and that extends to thoughts or murder. Just one dislike - the books is made up of the web posts of two people, but they write in such a similar way, it is hard to tell them apart. They use the same words even, echo the same thoughts. Perhaps it is deliberate - the book is the more menacing to be completed in the same tone - perhaps Joanne wants us to be on edge not quite knowing who is hiding behind which identity.It is a close community, rife with conflicting factions. Outsiders are not welcome, and those who do not fit in are the subject of gossip and speculation. There is a great deal of snobbery, and there is bitter rivalry between the state school and St Oswald's, the grammar school.