Saturday, March 29, 2014

Appropriate title...

Hands down, Flynn is a good novelist. 

That being said, I can't say that I am a really big fan of her writing.  I have now read this one, as well as Gone Girl.  Both are well crafted thriller suspense novels.  I have grappled with my reactions to Flynn's writing and characters, and I think where I end up is that although these are truly good books for the genre, I find them really bleak, dark forays in to human psychology.  This is not a terrible thing, but I find that the absence of the redeeming, or of hope in a sense, makes these books not quite my cup of tea. 

I am not quite sure how to articulate this feeling, but these are not happy books to read.  The characters are definitely interesting, and everything comes together with some pretty amazing twists in the end... as I mentioned it is well written, but at the end of the day, it is a bit of an unsettling read.  I don't always need a knight in shining armor, or a happy ending, I just find these books to just not be completely satisfying as a result of the bleak darkness that the characters and tale tends to exude.  In a Tarantino kind of way, you could see this book as the adult characters ultimately catch their dues. 

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