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Average Customer Rating:

Great Debut Novel but Characters and Narrative need to be fleshed out

Customer Rating:

This debut novel is articulately written. Bordering on the bizarre and grotesquely unbelievable, this novel examines one of the most dysfunctional 'Mommy Dearest' families ever to hit the written page. The novel's genre is hard to describe. It is part thriller, part psychological mystery, partly a drama about family dysfunction, part murder mystery and partly a drama/memoir of the impacts of abuse. The protagonist has a history of self-mutilation, cutting herself so badly that there are no areas on her body except for her face and hands that she can't leave uncovered if she wants to hide her secret. She has to wear turtlenecks, long sleeve shirts, pants, etc. From a clinical perspective, a cutter is someone who suffers excruciating emotional pain that is persistent, hard to identify, and takes up all of a person's consciousness. Usually, cutters have a history of abuse/trauma in their own backgrounds. Cutting, as a metaphorical blood-letting, causes pain in a specific place and allows the pain to be isolated to one part of the body. As the blood flows, the pain goes. In theory, once the blood is let, the pain identified and the intensity of the pain decreased, one is better able to function. However, cutting is not a good coping mechanism because the true source of the pain is not addressed, self-mutilation creates it's own shame-based symptoms, and cutting becomes a form of self-medication rather than treatment for root causes. Cutting is a short-term coping mechanism for a deep-rooted and serious underlying pathology. The protagonist of this page-turning novel is a journalist who returns home after many years with no contact with her mother and step-father. From the tim she enters the house, the reader has goose bumps because of the creepiness and fear-factor that the house and its inhabitants radiate. She notices that her younger sister is sexually promiscuous and using a lot of drugs. This reminds her of her own sexual promiscuity and drug use when she was an adolescent. She decides to investigate and find out what is lying in the dank underbelly of her familial home. There is an abundant sense of creepiness about many of the characters. However, no character is fully fleshed out. The narrative is interesting and the writing is good, but there are too many odds and ends in the narrative that dead-end or are not followed through with. Because I liked the book and it had so much potential, I wanted to know more of the 'who, what and why'. I recommend buying this book or taking it our of the library because despite criticisms, it is a good book. Once the author gets her phenomenal gift for writing congruent with a well-told tale and flushed out characters, there could be some great surprises in store!

Sharp Objects	Customer Rating:
I hate to give this book a bad review but to me this book is too dark and too weird. The story being about a little girl killed and one gone missing should have given me a clue. Mysteries are my favorite but this just wasn't my cup of tea!

Wow -- what a debut!

Customer Rating:

This is an extremely well-written and forceful book, especially for a first novel. There's nothing remotely tentative about this story of Chicago reporter Camille Preaker's return to her little southeast Missouri hometown to do a story on the murder of two local young girls less than a year apart. It may be the work of a serial killer and the local head cop is out of his depth, so they've called in a homicide specialist from Kansas City. But the murder investigation is only part of the story. More mesmerizing, and a good deal creepier, is Camille's re-examination of her own family, which brings new meaning to the description "dysfunctional." Camille's younger sister, Marian, died two decades ago at about the same age as the recently murdered girls, having been "cared for" by Adora, their vampiric mother. Then, a few years later, Adora had another daughter, Camille's half-sister, Amma, who, at thirteen, is extraordinarily pretty, precociously sexual, and who bosses the clique that runs the school with calculated cruelty. She's very much her mother's daughter. Stephen King, not noted for gushing endorsements of other people's work, comments on the jacket that the effect of the narration is cumulative, and that's exactly right. As you move farther and farther into this horror, you dread what you know is probably coming, but you're unable to look away, to stop reading. Flynn's style is both unadorned and exquisitely sharp. The former comes out in Camille's matter-of-fact description of her own pathology: She's a "cutter," having spent most of her life incising words into her body with knives and razors, cultivating the scars until she dare not wear anything but long sleeves and pants legs. The latter is demonstrated by the fact that this book just leaps with sly, quotable lines: "It was a natural gift for Adora, making other women feel incidental." A visiting cop "peeled the label of the empty beer bottle next to him and smoothed it out onto the table. Messy. A sure sign he'd never worked in a bar." In describing the way her mother manipulates everyone, Camille relates how the death of her little sister was so useful in that regard. No matter what anyone said, "my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby." Or, "Reporters are like vampires. They can't come into your house without your invitation, but once they're there, you won't get them out till they've sucked you dry." Or, "`So hard to get good help these days,' she muttered earnestly, unaware no one really says that who's not on TV." Or, "Like all rural towns, Wind Gap has an obsession with machinery. Most homes own a car and a half for every occupant (the half being an antique collectible, or an old piece of crap on blocks, depending on the income bracket)." One of my favorites, in describing an acquaintance's rather bland husband: "He was good-looking if you looked at him long enough." Flynn also has the knack of setting an entire mood by describing a single detail. For example, the little town of Wind Gap snaps into focus when Camille notes that she found the police chief "banging the dent out of a stop sign at the corner of Second and Ely, a few blocks from the police station." Or, of a group of 13-year-old girls passing around a bottle of rum: "The rim of the bottle was ringed with pink lip gloss." Damn, that's good stuff. This is one of those books you'll keep thinking about for months. Flynn is definitely going on my list of new authors to watch.

Leaves one with 'rotten feelings'

Customer Rating:

The razor blade on the front cover of the book is what one yearns for right after embarking on this read, sharp blade with which to cut every single page, one by one, until they are so neatly shredded that even the memory of what was written on them becomes non existent. And then, one can use the same razor to end one's own life. I'm still unsure what the author was thinking when she began this book, unless she had some very deep and very disturbing mental issues to work through. This book is dangerous and not because it excites one with a thrilling and suspenseful story. It is dangerous because once one reads it, one looses any desire to look for another book that may restore one's faith in the existence of good books with an uplifting charge. Not only is this book dangerous, but it is sick. Its underlying sickness is that it's emotionally draining and unless readers are looking to load up on more mental baggage (I can't think of anyone who doesn't have enough), I'd stay away from its pain. The main character is a female reporter who returns home on an assignment (covering the serial murders of two little girls). As memories of her painful childhood emerge, readers find a lot more about her character, for example her alcoholic addiction and her obsession to carve words into her own flesh. Waves of her unresolved issues wash away further hopes of a challenging literary work as readers are practically dragged into her problems (not loved enough by her mother, not popular enough in school, not motivated enough in her work) and are subjected to the anguish of either feeling sorry for her or wanting to end her existence. As disturbing details of the two murders resurface, readers are introduced to yet two more characters as equally unpleasant as the first. There is the psychologically unstable (almost emotionally poisonous) personality of her mother and the pathologically sinister and equally disturbed one of the teenage sister. And of course there are the endlessly problematic and mentally crushing details of the small-town's Midwest America (why would one want to read this is beyond my understanding). This book robs one of smiles, of the beauty of life, and even of the reason for love. It is not only bitter, but leaves one with an unpleasant smell of what I'd like to call rotten feelings. I can't brand the book dull (as it did leave me with unwanted thoughts), but I can promise you that you'll feel dull once you've read it. I don't recommend it, but may compare the feelings I have for it to what Chuck Palahniuk's 'Choke' birthed in me. by Simon Cleveland

Impressive	Customer Rating:
Solid book. Great twist. Maintains attention throughout. Disturbing at times. Wasn't expecting much going in but Flynn's debut novel was pretty impressive.