Reporting in on three recent books!
First, Reckless Girls by Rachel Hawkins. Promoted as a thriller featuring a half dozen beautiful people on a remote South Pacific island, people start dying and everyone has secrets. Not exactly accurate, but anyway. It was fun at times, but more and more it was obvious that the author had more than liberally lifted from the true crime story of Palmyra Atoll in the 70s. When I finally got past the disappointing ending (which I was more than anticipating at that point) the author does in fact reference reading And the Sea Will Tell (the definitive if arguably highly biassed account) when she was young but doesn't bother to name the authors of that book (Vincent Bugliosi and Bruce Henderson). Fellow readers, I think I'm over the whole psychopathic female "heroine" book genre. I feel like too often the author is making an either obviously traumatic backstory or in this case somewhat flimsy excuse to make their characters behave very badly. And once again we have these falsely modest characters who somehow attract the hottest character(s), who so often just happen to be in turn rich, and then just not attentive enough or something so they need to die.
Sigh. Did anyone read Stuart Woods? He had this recurring character Stone Barrington who, despite several dozen novels, remained one-dimensional in what would appear to be the manifestation of everything the author himself and his life was not. I used to read those books - there were some good ones, great for the beach or an airport delay - but he finally lost me when the setting was an environment/industry I know well and it wasn't even close. One of those authors that has a good thing going but ends up just churning it out in the end.
So then, in need of something original and well written, I went to Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson. The structure/approach is not that original - a story within a story - but the way it all wove together was fascinating. The title is double meaning - it's a story being told by one person to another, and it also opens with someone being rescued from drowning via mouth to mouth resuscitation. In any first person telling we have the happy potential for an unreliable narrator, and in this case, it's filtered through the book's actual narrator, whose own bias plays into the relaying of the first person's story to the reader. And it's a good story, interesting, you're right there with all the self questioning (what would you do?), the motives for each good and bad decision (or lack thereof) are presented to the reader within the story so we can play along. It's outlandish at times, but as presented, you see how these things can just sort of happen. Much as been made of the last line of the book, but as I think back on it, I think there was a lot more subtly to the whole thing. As the NY Times Book Review likes to say, it's a "slim novel," so not a huge commitment and well worth it in the end.
And then, finished very late last night, The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. This book was a huge deal when first published in France, winning tons of prizes, and I'm not surprised because wow! For most of my life I've had the unreasonable bias that books can only truly be enjoyed in the form in which the author intended, but recently having read excellent, prose-filled books originally written in Japanese and Swedish, and French, I'm changing my tune. Funnily enough, one of the characters in this book is an author who also does translations (recent recurring theme in books I'm reading - they include writers, often it would seem as an outlet for the author's own life/career). Anyway, I don't even know how to describe this (sci fi? character study? advanced math and physics dissertation? love story? philosophical musings? future blockbuster movie? all of the above?) without giving away major plot points, it's a mash up of a lot of things, too many to unpack when I'm still only a few hours from finishing it, so I'll just say look it up and if the jacket description interests you, go for it.
www.nytimes.com
(and yes, I know this book is heavily fictionalized, but still)
So sorry to hear this. I still have this book on display with other dance books. I loved it and at one time could probably quote the text from every page. I’d read a while back that Stephanie was living near a town in Wyoming that we liked to visit. I thought of her whenever we were there. Rip beautiful dancer.
