Fear, Loathing...and Scars of a Small Town Life

books:


	• Sharp Objects: A Novel Gillian Flynn Three Rivers Press, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 119 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fear, Loathing...and Scars of a Small Town Life

Camille Preaker is a fragile being. She's like a three-legged chair trying to keep its balance, and barely managing to do so. Then, she's asked by her editor (and unspoken surrogate father) to return to her small town, the source of her fragility, fear, scars, and demons, to hunt down the story behind the deaths of two girls. What she encounters are lots of people she doesn't like, including members of her own family. She's suggestible to manipulation, craves love, but friendly attention will do, but mostly wants to please her boss.
The author mocks small town life to create the dark, nasty, vindictive and secrets-bound environment which helps create the story's suspense. The antipathy Camille opines about almost all of the people led me to almost stop reading the novel, so much of downer about human beings, their motives, and behavior it depicted.
The story is a sad one: of the boredoms, and petty, and not-so-petty cruelties, of small town existence. It's also sad in its depiction of cruel, harried and ignorant parenting.
Ms. Flynn wrote a tale of sharp pictures and scenes, a sympathetic protagonist, and of love turned dark, ugly, warped, or in little evidence.
The story's last sentence feels like it was added to leave the reader questionably uplifted.
And, I will look for Ms. Flynn's next novel. She's got a gift, but one that shows more potential than what shows up in this novel.

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Well written, but can guess killer easily

A newspaper reporter at a small Chicago newspaper is sent on assignment to her old hometown in Wind Gap, Mo. to find out why young girls keep showing up dead.

This was a really quick read. I found it very enthralling, especially the parts where the main character described why she cut herself when she was younger. I never understood cutting, so reading a character trying to describe why they say it and what they are thinking when they do it, helps to understand why young girls do it. That isn't the main part of the story, but just a subplot that really helps the reader get inside the main character's head while she is trying to work on the murder story for her paper in a town she did not want to return. She ran away to get away from her mother, but she was back living with her mother and her young half-sister that her mother adores, while also dealing with the haunting reminders of her dead younger sister that her mother obviously loved more than her.

There is a lot going on in the story, but it is very well written. My only complaint was I saw who was committing the murders about halfway through the book. I didn't guess the full reason, but it wasn't surprising when I found out the full reason behind it. Gillian Flynn is a writer for Entertainment Weekly. She reviews television. I wonder if watching and reviewing crime shows gave her some ideas for the book, but from watching my fair share of them myself, I think that was what helped me guess the killer.

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Disturbing, but in a good way

I did not expect this book to intrigue me as well as it did. The story was disturbing, but kept me interested until the end.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker?s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille?s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.

NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family?s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.

HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims?a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.

With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.

From the Hardcover edition.

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