Donna Masini

This is a fascinating book. Fascinating because it doesn't start off that well, gets progressively more unlikely and still you read. As it descends into the pits of novel-hell, I sit and read more and more at each session, then finally - the climax. A full-fledged psychotic breakdown of the 'heroine' accompanied by a total break with reality from the author. There isn't an ending, the author just runs out of steam and can't even think of a Jodi Picoult-type cop-out ending.

The story (and its all on the back of the book) is that an English professor who is both beauteous, well-off and happily-married suspects her husband is having an affair. She becomes obsessed with the other woman and the story swings between her Catholic faith, extremely unlikely family, her lover (!), her therapist to whom she lies, al-anon meetings although she is neither an alcoholic nor an enabler, and her time breaking into and stealing from the other woman's apartment which the other woman never notices. In the final scene where she is confronted by our 'heroine' who has on her clothes (she doesn't notice), has her bag, two sets of her keys, has left a takeaway in her apartment, and is slapping her about, she just dismisses the whole thing because she is a WASP and doesn't want to make a scene with the police, just get home for Christmas. Geez...

The heroine is physically like the author, also Italian-American, Catholic and a poet, and one wonders if this book is some sort of revenge on the 'other woman' or her husband? If so, it doesn't work, one feels nothing but sympathy for anyone who has to deal with this psychopathic woman who never once displays any empathy with another character and lashes out like a hurt child at everyone, but finds her own, similar, behaviour, quite acceptable. I wonder just how autobiographical this book is?

Fascinating for true, fascinatingly bad. The sort of book where if you'd made a paperclip chain instead you would have felt you'd wasted your time less.
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