Summary:
The year is 1990. The Lawton family has been through hell. Elder sister Leslie was kidnapped, and never found. Father Lance couldn't handle the anguish that his daughter's kidnapping brought him and his family, and he drove himself off a bridge. Mother Lauren drinks too much and has become completely obsessed with the prime suspect in the case, Roland Ballencoa, and wants to see him brought to justice by any means possible. Younger sister Leah cuts herself to get rid of the pain of dealing with her family's issues. Lauren and Leah move out of their old town, where everything reminds them of Leslie and Lance. They move into Oak Knoll, and in the first outing in their new town, Lauren sees Ballencoa driving by. Lauren fears that he's stalking them again, and she won't stand for that. She'll do anything to keep her other daughter safe and get justice for Leslie. Anything.
Thoughts:
What a dark, dark book. This book was a gift from someone, and I didn't know what to expect. It's pretty brutal at some points. As the reader, you see through the eyes of both the remaining Lawtons, as well as those of the several cops involved in the case, a friend of Lauren's, and worst of all, Ballencoa. Ballencoa's gross thoughts and actions made me recoil in disgust. Leah's heartbreaking self-doubt made me want to hug her. And I wanted to shake some sense into Lauren so badly. All this tells me it was extremely well-written. That said, it dragged. Sure, the characters were really well-developed. The setting of 1990 made things really interesting, since today's DNA capabilities weren't available to them then. The prose was good, and the story was engaging. But it took me a month and a half to finally get through the book. I don't know if I was just discomforted by the subject matter in its entirety, or if it was that all the characters had serious mental issues that was hard to swallow, or that it just didn't engage me as much as it should have. It was a good book. It just took me forever.
Book 2 of 50
Pages: 484
Genre: Mystery, thriller
Grade: B+
Would I Recommend?: Sure, but make sure you're giving yourself plenty of time for it. Not recommended for teens or younger!
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mental illness. Show all posts
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Sunday, August 26, 2012
The Pleasure of My Company (Steve Martin)
Summary:
Daniel is a guy who used to be a computer programmer for Hewlett-Packard. Now he's a hermit with so many mental hang-ups, he can't even count them, let alone the rest of us. He spends most days exactly the same, spying on an unknowing real estate agent through his open window, doing nonsensical puzzles and mathematical calculations in his head just because he can, and avoiding curbs at all costs because there could be a scary abyss lurking at the bottom of that three-inch step. His whole world is centered around dealing with his imagined issues, and he hardly ever ventures past them to converse with the outside world.
Thoughts:
Yes, it's that Steve Martin. To be honest, it's weird. It took me a long time to get through it, including going through a ridiculous number of books between when I started it and when I finished it. I got my hands on it initially through PaperbackSwap.com (which is an awesome resource for books, particularly because it doesn't cost all that much!) in mid-February, started it maybe in March. I just took a look, and the next book I had my hands on from PBS Dead as a Doornail, which I finished and posted about in late March. There are twenty two books between that book and this one now. As I type this post up (in mid-June), it took easily three months to start, and then subsequently get myself back to, this book. That doesn't bode well as a gauge of how much I liked it. But, as usual, I digress. The book is droll. It doesn't have specific chapter markers, nor easily noted stoppage points. A scene could go on for a paragraph before moving on to the next, or it could take five pages, and you could never tell which it would be until you got to the end of it. I was hoping that the author's comedic background would lend itself to creating a fun, light-hearted book that I would love and adore almost as much as I do him. But alas, that was absolutely not the case. I read sixty pages, over the course of about a month, and couldn't stand it anymore. I put it down for nearly two months before picking it up again. In the end, it takes until page 88 of a 163 page book for anything of substance to happen. Until then, the reader is introduced to more and more of the main character's crazy until you want to kill him and put him, and yourself, out of your shared misery. From page 88, it turns out to be almost interesting, but by that point, I was so fed up with the crazy that I just wanted to power through to the end to get the whole mess over with. I don't recommend this book, by any means, unless you're severely mentally challenged and think this will be a help to you. Seriously, don't bother. Steve Martin's comedic prowess makes no appearance in this novella. None.
Book 34 of 50
Pages: 163
Genre: General fiction
Grade: D+
Would I Recommend?: Nope. Not even because it's Steve Martin.
Daniel is a guy who used to be a computer programmer for Hewlett-Packard. Now he's a hermit with so many mental hang-ups, he can't even count them, let alone the rest of us. He spends most days exactly the same, spying on an unknowing real estate agent through his open window, doing nonsensical puzzles and mathematical calculations in his head just because he can, and avoiding curbs at all costs because there could be a scary abyss lurking at the bottom of that three-inch step. His whole world is centered around dealing with his imagined issues, and he hardly ever ventures past them to converse with the outside world.
Thoughts:
Yes, it's that Steve Martin. To be honest, it's weird. It took me a long time to get through it, including going through a ridiculous number of books between when I started it and when I finished it. I got my hands on it initially through PaperbackSwap.com (which is an awesome resource for books, particularly because it doesn't cost all that much!) in mid-February, started it maybe in March. I just took a look, and the next book I had my hands on from PBS Dead as a Doornail, which I finished and posted about in late March. There are twenty two books between that book and this one now. As I type this post up (in mid-June), it took easily three months to start, and then subsequently get myself back to, this book. That doesn't bode well as a gauge of how much I liked it. But, as usual, I digress. The book is droll. It doesn't have specific chapter markers, nor easily noted stoppage points. A scene could go on for a paragraph before moving on to the next, or it could take five pages, and you could never tell which it would be until you got to the end of it. I was hoping that the author's comedic background would lend itself to creating a fun, light-hearted book that I would love and adore almost as much as I do him. But alas, that was absolutely not the case. I read sixty pages, over the course of about a month, and couldn't stand it anymore. I put it down for nearly two months before picking it up again. In the end, it takes until page 88 of a 163 page book for anything of substance to happen. Until then, the reader is introduced to more and more of the main character's crazy until you want to kill him and put him, and yourself, out of your shared misery. From page 88, it turns out to be almost interesting, but by that point, I was so fed up with the crazy that I just wanted to power through to the end to get the whole mess over with. I don't recommend this book, by any means, unless you're severely mentally challenged and think this will be a help to you. Seriously, don't bother. Steve Martin's comedic prowess makes no appearance in this novella. None.
Book 34 of 50
Pages: 163
Genre: General fiction
Grade: D+
Would I Recommend?: Nope. Not even because it's Steve Martin.
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