<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Good but hardly perfect
Review: I enjoyed most of this book immensely, until the ending. The story was packed with sufficiently creepy characters, several possible suspects, and it kept me turning the pages. But the ending was very disappointing in that I felt it was rushed, as if the author was in a big hurry to wrap it all up without enough proper explanations. For instance, what finally happened to the Hopkinses? And what happened with Georgie's career. And why were we not given so much as a clue to the true identity of the killer until the very end? Also I found the author's skipping back and forth from past to present tense very annoying. Once she even did it in the same paragraph!
Rating: 
Summary: SOMEWHAT ENTERTAINING, BUT DISAPPOINTING...
Review: I know full well that I cannot expect to 'really like' every book that I pick up, but I was particularly disappointed in this one. I bought it to give myself something 'lighter' to read, to give myself a break, to just sit back and be entertained. It was a little hard to get into it at first, but after about 50-60 pages, I found that I was interested enough to keep going. When I was finished, I was left with the feeling that I should have gone with my initial instinct, to set it aside early on.The jacket blurbs tout the slow, inexorable buildup to a 'PSYCHO-like tension. Ms. White is not without talent (and, with 10 other books to her credit, she most likely has loyal readers), but I think this story would have been better-served as a film, or perhaps as a made-for-TV movie, complete with a few recognizable personalities venturing outside of their regular roles in their attempts to 'stretch out' as actors. I have to agree with another reviewer, who cited their feeling that the author suddenly increased the pace of the story when she decided it was time for it to be over. There were far too many questions raised that were left unanswered, too many issues touched upon that were never resolved. The main character's relationship with Oliver feels extremely 'forced' from a literary point of view -- and whatever becomes of Dave? Ms. White birngs up some interesting and vital points about the social services field, as well as some psychological insight into depression and codependency. It's obvious that she is sensitive to these issues, and even knowlegeable -- but no real conclusions are drawn, no solutions suggested. Painting the experience without offering any real guidance or options makes it appear as nothing more than a device to inject emotion and tension into a very rambling work. It's almost as if the author were whipping up the book from a recipe, saw that the book she was cooking needed to be 'on the table', and popped it into the microwave at the end. I was left with the impression that my reading experience suffered because of someone else's deadline -- perhaps she even lost interest in her own story toward the end. I think the next time I want something that is both entertaining and genuinely terrifying, I'll pick up a copy of THE LOTTERY or something else by Shirley Jackson -- I know for a fact that it'll still scare the hell out of me after all these years, and it'll be worth my time.
Rating: 
Summary: A Plethora of Adjectivism
Review: This book spent more time trying to impress the reader with a superfluidity of adjectives than on the substance of the story. This author's efforts to skip from the past to the present in parallel stories drops the reader somewhere in the middle! Not a bad story line, but a botched attempt at suspense. This was not a nail-biter; this was not a page burner; it was laborious to follow the story with the constant interruptions and overwriting on inconsequential elements of the story. Her next book can only be better!
<< 1 >>
| 
