The Girl on the Train is a read-in-one-sitting thriller from the perspectives of three women in each others’ orbits. They’re all flawed-to-unlikeable, but somehow still sympathetic, which is a nice balancing act and the result of some skillful writing. Overall, the whole book is successful on so many levels, from being an enticing character study, to a fast-paced, compelling mystery. Have you seen that Donald Glover sketch about crazy women stories vs crazy man stories? If you haven’t, I recommend you watch it, but if […]
YMMV on this very well-written, hard-to-put-down book with a been-there-done-that ‘surprise’ ending that I nevertheless didn’t like all that much.
Oyyyyyyyyyyy. This book. This well-written, stylistically self-assured, engaging book. This frustrating, sorta smug, but ultimately cliched, little book. This is one of those times where things are complicated. First, the book was good, but that doesn’t mean I like it. Second, the ending ruined everything. I try not to deliver spoilers in my reviews anyway, but in this case the enjoyment of the book is almost entirely based on knowing absolutely nothing going in, so I will say absolutely nothing about it. At least, not […]
“But screw your courage to the sticking-place”
It seems like Philippa Palfrey has everything–a scholarship to Cambridge (or Oxford, I can’t remember which), comfortably-off parents, health and beauty–but she feels that there’s a part of her selfhood missing. She’s always known she was adopted, but not who her birthparents were, or why she has very little memory before the age of eight. She sets out to find the answers, and discovers a legacy of blood and horrible crime. Meanwhile, Norman Scase is a milquetoastish middle-aged, verging on elderly, man, who made a deathbed promise […]
Troubling on so many levels
I’ve read Gillian Flynn’s body of work in reverse. I first became aware of her when everyone was reading Gone Girl, so I jumped on the bandwagon and tore through that novel like the suspenseful page-turner that it is. Next I read Dark Places, and in some ways I liked it even more, with its dark, In Cold Blood feel, though at times I felt like Flynn piled on the disfunction a bit too heavily. “How much more can this family go through?” I remember […]
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