This is the Diary of a penitent Sinner. We know she was Penitent because she tells Us repeatedly, despite the fact that she continues to Sin with a ReThis is the Diary of a penitent Sinner. We know she was Penitent because she tells Us repeatedly, despite the fact that she continues to Sin with a Reckless abandonment that should be Enjoyable but is not, Really. She essentially Runs around London prostituting herself for Around forty years, and stealing from people, insisting that she feels Bad while showing no evidence of feeling so. There is some Enjoyment to be had in its depiction of the completely Unstoppable "Mrs. Flanders" (not her Real name and, no, Mara Dyer fans, you don't find out what her real Name is, either). Nothing puts a dent in this Woman, whether it's being Seduced, stolen from, forced into marriage, Impregnated, bankrupted, Arrested, caught out in her various misbehaviours. I'm making this sound fun - it's not Fun. It's written Like This, for one, and there are also no paragraph breaks. Or very few. You will wonder if Daniel Defoe's Caps Lock AND his space bar were both Broken, and his creativity and source of literary talent. It's just dull. Somehow a story of a woman who Spends her whole life Cheating people, being cheated, and Spectacularly worming her way out of every single Nightmare that befalls her with a steely determination and only occasional Fainting fits can be dull. I don't understand it Either....more
This book starts well, but then quickly deteriorates into a well-written but ultimately lifeless and icky little endeavour. The writing is brisk and cThis book starts well, but then quickly deteriorates into a well-written but ultimately lifeless and icky little endeavour. The writing is brisk and clean, but the whole thing was just a bit too British for me - and this is coming from someone who has lived in England her whole life. It's a dark and disturbing little novel, but it's utterly bloodless and restrained in a way that should be more effective, but also leaves it feeling toothless and contradictory, a psychological thriller that wants to be about sexual obsession and a descent into madness but feels almost jokingly middle-class.
In an attempt to keep everything harmonious, as well, Hancock has her characters behave in the most ridiculous ways. So, as the blurb says, Sonia kidnaps Jez by keeping him in the house, drugging him and lying to him. I don't consider myself a very streetwise person, but by the time I'd fallen into a druggy sleep several times, been tied up and being repeatedly told that I can't leave the house by a woman that seems more than a little unstable, would I really assume that it was in the name of a birthday party? Honest to God, I know Hancock tried to explain it by saying that Jez was sheltered and naive, but there's sheltered and naive and then there's apparently the type of fifteen-year-old that lacks even the most basic comprehensive skills and has never turned on a TV or read a newspaper. I assume it was an attempt to keep any blood or violence out of the novel, as Jez fighting back would've necessitated, but instead it just seemed ludicrous bordering on funny.
Speaking of which, the supposedly sexually charged flashbacks of Sonia and her obsession from the past, Seb, having sex, kissing and practicing a kind of thirteen-year-old version of BDSM or whatever were cringey rather than atmospheric. ("No sex, please, we're British!") Hancock's writing is definitely good, the pacing is quick and compelling, but the whole thing is just a vague type of icky, like a thin layer of sticky substance I want to wash off, instead of a deeply disturbing and intense experience. Sonia insists she's not violent, nor does she want to hurt Jez, but the total lack of introspection in her voice just leaves the thing feeling sort of half-baked and underdone....more
I am not the person to talk to about this book. It's...okay? Blah. It's not flowery or pretentious - it just is what it is: a book of short, often sweI am not the person to talk to about this book. It's...okay? Blah. It's not flowery or pretentious - it just is what it is: a book of short, often sweet stories about the different (but not all that different) lives of people in Dublin. I think my good rating might have more to do with the fact that I am insanely loaded down with work this week, and I kept looking at Joyce and thinking "uuuuugh" when I thought about reading it, because I thought it would inevitably turn out like "In Memoriam" last week - something I had no time to read and therefore had to half-read, while frantically flipping through the poem and trying to squeeze an essay out of it. But no. I sat down and read it all. Quick, riveting and pretty enjoyable. Though I can't tell if my relief is because, thank you God, it's over and I didn't have to kill myself to read it. ...more
The Lincoln Lawyer is a strange one for me. My feelings towards this book can be best summed up as - well, I was enamoured with it until I wa2.5 stars
The Lincoln Lawyer is a strange one for me. My feelings towards this book can be best summed up as - well, I was enamoured with it until I wasn't.
This was a VERY slow one for me - I read the first 60% in about a week, then I just...stopped. I took a HUGE break and I'm not even sure why. I got into it all right, and I liked Connelly's very matter-of-fact, direct, simple style...until I didn't. I don't really know what changed, but something did. Perhaps this book is just too long? The punchy, no-nonsense style works for a very intense, dramatic book with lots of twists and turns, but frankly this book had too many pages and too few twists and turns to sustain this kind of pace. Therefore, instead of feeling quick and explosive, it was a damp squib, utterly bloodless.
Essentially, it's a by-the-numbers legal thriller. The LA setting invested me to start with, but it's not remotely palpable beyond the odd name-drop of a place - "Boulevard", "Ventura" etc. The main character is a schlub with a conscience (of course he is) and, for all the blurb's promise of him being a "sleazy defence attorney", Connelly keeps everything very black and white by making his opponent, despite being a prosecutor, also a total sleaze and ensuring that, though Mickey does his job, he does it without any relish. He also doesn't do anything particularly controversial or dramatic. There is nothing original about The Lincoln Lawyer - sleazy rich boys, platonic prostitutes, an ex-wife he still loves, a daughter he never sees. You've seen all this before, and Connelly doesn't even seem to be TRYING to add anything new.
The fact that it says "Mickey Haller, #1" up there should already give this away - there's zero sense of danger. Sure, so Mickey occasionally appears like he might be up on a murder charge or that he's pissed off the wrong person, but he's not exactly going to die, go to prison or get disbarred. This is where the punchy style totally fell flat. It should have made the pages fly and instead it just robbed the weak and unoriginal plot of any emotional or dramatic impact. For instance, when Haller figures out (quickly, so this isn't going under spoiler tags) that Roulet isn't the "innocent guy" Haller thinks he is, I don't care, because Connelly didn't give me any reason to care about Roulet's innocence or guilt. It's just a standard legal story - Haller takes a case that should be simple, turns out it's not, somebody he loves dies, gets in too deep and then pulls himself out with the help of minor characters we've seen before.
Yet I can't quite drop the rating all the way because there was SOMETHING in those first pages that kept me turning them. There are good moments and I enjoyed the minor characters like Lorna (where did she go?!), Raul and Gloria. This seems like it's crying out for a film adaptation (I'm not surprised that there was one) because it seems to be begging actors to breathe life into the paper-flat characters, deliver the quick dialogue, set designers and directors to illuminate the Los Angeles setting and a half-decent scriptwriter to flesh out the basic plot. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for Connelly. ...more
This book is, frankly, trashy. Really trashy. The characters are paper-thin (the dutiful but boring dad! the flighty drug-addict runaway mum! her scumThis book is, frankly, trashy. Really trashy. The characters are paper-thin (the dutiful but boring dad! the flighty drug-addict runaway mum! her scumbag husband! the bad twin, all sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll and screaming fits! the good twin, all saintly halo and perfect temper!) and never once ascend above the annoying stereotypes they have been given. The twins are particularly frustrating characters - Georgie, the "bad" twin, is not "bad" in as in "evil", but she is foul-tempered, foul-mouthed, violent and she has always been this way. Kay, on the other hand, is perfect. Sweet, loving, ambitious, NEVER a cross word to her dad. There are simply no people like this, no people who are such extremes. And it is vital to sympathise with the twins, which I didn't.
The plotting is addictive but atrocious. I read this one really quickly, and I didn't stop reading for a lot of it. It's fast-paced and the writing is so minimalist that you can get through a lot very snappily. But Fitzgerald totally fails to capitalise on any of the interesting things about her premise. Should he let one girl die? Will only contemplates that very briefly, and while on drugs. Doesn't go through with the organ donation thing. The twist about the parentage is no twist at all because it's obvious from the start. The plotting is pure pulp, with a special mention to the end, which is so XXX that I spent most of it saying, "Oh, God, it's not going there..." (but it is, and it's sad that the novel had to end on such a duff note, because my rating might have been kinder had that not left a sour taste in my mouth.)
There are so many strands that seem pointless or left hanging, such as Georgie's brief, bizarre non-relationship with the seventeen-year-old stalker Will hires to track down Georgie's mother, which just ends, or my personal favourite, Will's relationship with Linda, which seems to be there solely to assure the adult readers that, really, ignore the two eighteen-year-olds that are central to the plot, this is not a YA novel. I have no problem with sex scenes, even the S+M ones on display here - they're not at all graphic, but they are so pointless and gratuitious, contributing absolutely nothing to the plot except another character and a bit of very "adult" sex. Yawn. It felt like it was supposed to be funny, which it wasn't.
And yet the writing is good. The humour is especially great. Even though I don't have my book to hand, I can still summon up this one from my memory: Will is watching his twin girls in the hospital beds, both of them are very sick and he's beside himself with worry: "Will would have shot himself right then and there had his gun not been filed under G in his filing cabinet." ...more
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