“There was no evidence of a break-in. My father had no alibi. The facts just added up, for me.” What facts?! Those aren’t facts, those are the complete absence of facts. What alibi is he supposed to have in the middle of the night? How little must her opinion of her father been to just automatically believe that he was a murderer. I was expecting an emotional story with some mystery but what I got instead was literally one phone call that led to the truth with a whole lot of backstory preceding up to it.

Lauren is 32 years old but still so massively fragile, with a pathological dependence on her older brother and an equally pathological aversion to marrying easily the most tolerant boyfriend in literary history. Clearly suffering from some sort of anxiety disorder, I just wanted her therapist to prescribe her with something so I didn’t have to keep hearing about the smoky room and the too big couch. She describes her mother’s death, presumably at her father’s hands as her “one truth”, without which “there was no ground underneath”. How such a pitiful woman wakes up in the morning, let alone has an actual job defies reality. Either she’s just melodramatic or this woman should be in a mental facility.

This is one of those books that I thought was written well despite my issues with the general plot line. For such a short book, it really didn’t need to be broken up into 5 separate sections. Details were too sparse in some places and too overindulgent in others. The dialogue was, let’s just say not in line with how modern humans speak. I liked Alex, Sylvia and Gerry, which made it more bearable. I thought the ultimate reveal made sense but so little went into it actually happening and it just didn’t wrap up in a conclusive way. The rest was Lauren wringing her hands and feeling anxious about Alex, and Lauren wringing her hands and feeling anxious about Gerry and so on. If I wanted to read a book about mental illness, I would’ve picked something else off my shelf. ( )

Another book that I really wanted to like, but in the end wound up finishing simply because I was so far into it that I did not want to just abandon it. Many of the reviews I had read mentioned plot twists and elements of suspense. Instead I found that once all the characters were introduced it was obvious who the real culprit was so there was absolutely no Whodunit factor! I felt absolutely no bond to any of the characters beyond Sylvia and her brother. ( )

I can’t say I loved this book, but it kept me turning pages and I stayed up late to finish it. It was an OK story told fairly well. It was full of one of my pet peeves; naming every object in the room, especially brand names. Like a weird cross between product placement and fetish in a way that guarantees it won’t even be readable to anyone in a few years. ( )

I was listening to this book while I painted a few rooms in a house right off of Maplewood. And that was awesome. ( )

I was listening to this book while I painted a few rooms in a house right off of Maplewood. And that was awesome. ( )