Literary Treats

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Review | Luckiest Girl Alive, Jessica Knoll

Posted on 19 May 2015 by Jaclyn

Ani FaNelli appears to have the perfect life – a glamourous job at a glossy magazine, a gorgeous figure, and a handsome blue blood fiance. But beneath the facade are scars that she has worked for years to keep hidden, and a team of documentary filmmakers may very well bring the truth to light.

When I began Luckiest Girl Alive, I thought it was going to be just like Gone Girl. Ani reminded me of Gone Girl’s Amy in many ways — beautiful, cold and calculating. And right on the very first page, Ani is contemplating slipping a knife blade into her fiance’s stomach. So I figured, it was like Gone Girl, but we know the woman is a psychopath from the beginning.

Fortunately I was wrong. Luckiest Girl Alive wasn’t the straightforward psychological thriller I was expecting, and it was a much better book because of that. Knoll takes great pains to make Ani seem like a coldhearted bitch, but slowly peels back the layers of her past to reveal a very vulnerable young woman. There are a couple of big reveals about her past, and we realize why doing the documentary is so important to her. I found the flashback scenes powerful, and I was impressed with the contrast between Ani at fourteen and the much more guarded, faux confident Ani in the present day.

As a whole, the novel doesn’t quite come together completely. Perhaps it’s partly because her supposedly “perfect” adult life never really feels perfect. As well, Ani the adult just doesn’t quite add up — she seems more a wannabe rich bitch than an actual one, yet doesn’t quite show the vulnerability that could make the wannabe aspect work. Ani as a teenager felt more real, and I’m wondering if the personality shift could have been better integrated.

I also wish we knew more about Ani’s fiance. As it was, I didn’t quite understand why doing the documentary was such a big deal. And later on, I was mostly confused about his responses to various situations. At times, it felt like he was there more as a prop for the plot than an actual character.

The ending as well seemed really sudden. Elements of it made sense, but the shift to get to that point seemed to happen really quickly, and there was a minor tidbit that was left hanging for some reason. Perhaps the author felt she didn’t have to explain how that tidbit turned out, but it felt like such an important part of the story that I wish it had been closed off more neatly.

Overall though, the segments about Ani’s past really made the book for me. These raised some powerful, timely and highly relevant issues, and I thought the author did a great job in presenting teenage Ani as a complex, multi-layered character. At one point, remembering a particularly traumatic moment, Ani confesses to some really dark thoughts, and to me, that bit of darkness is far more interesting than the bitchy facade the author uses to make her character seem evil and unlikeable. These are the most powerful moments of the book, and the ones that make the slow start very much worth it.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ENDING
EDIT NOVEMBER 21, 2015

Since posting this review, I’ve received quite a number of questions about the ending, and I now really wish I hadn’t given my copy away because I’m now wondering if I’d missed things in my original reading.

Short response: I’m afraid I don’t remember anymore. I’d read it so long ago, and I no longer have a copy to refresh my memory.

So for anyone asking about the ending, here’s the reply I sent to one of the earlier emails I received, and please note that my interpretation of the seashell is by no means at all confirmed as accurate:

I agree on the big reveal (that Ani’s conversation with Dean was miked up to catch his confession), mostly because I didn’t think it was as much of a surprise as the build up led us to believe. That being said, I like that Ani finally got the confession she deserved all those years ago, and having it recorded puts the power back in her hands.

I thought the story as a whole could’ve held together better. What I like the most is that I thought it was one kind of story at the beginning (Gone Girl), but it was really about a young girl’s trauma. So in that sense, the conversation being miked and going public is a fitting happy ending. Personally, I thought the whole Gone Girl angle/fiancé subplot felt unnecessary – it would have been more powerful (and IMHO less confusing) if the author had stuck to the high school trauma story. Even the shooting part wasn’t really necessary – like the author tried to put so many reveals into one story.

Re seashell: It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I don’t remember the seashell playing a significant role necessarily, other than as a souvenir of the day with Arthur. I thought it was mostly part and parcel with the photo, and so both kinda meant a lot to her and her memory of Arthur, so her fiancé (can’t remember his name) being so casual about it just shows how little he really knows her.

Hope this helps, and if anyone has alternative explanations of the seashell or the ending, feel free to write in the comments!

Review | Someone is Watching, Joy Fielding

Posted on 23 March 2015 by Jaclyn

Private investigator Bailey Carpenter is attacked while working on a case, and her entire world falls apart. From being a confident, independent woman, she finds herself afraid to ride an elevator with a man and unable to sleep without having nightmares. Worse, she sees her attacker in almost every man she encounters — an obnoxious flirt at the gym, a man walking past her in the street, a narcissistic man in the apartment building across from hers. They all fit the frustratingly generic description of Bailey’s attacker: white male between the ages of 20 to 40 years old, average height, average build, wearing black Nikes.

I often find books involving sexual assault difficult to read — for example, Elizabeth Haynes’ Into the Darkest Corner kept me feeling claustrophobic, almost physically trapped, throughout. Fielding’s writing is a bit more detached that Haynes’, and while she did a good job of portraying Bailey’s fear and sense of paralysis after the attack, Someone is Watching felt more like an action-packed thriller than a psychological one.

Part of the reason may be that despite the attack that began the whole story, there were so many other things going on in Bailey’s life. A major subplot is the Bailey’s dysfunctional family — her father had had many children by different women, and left his vast fortune only to Bailey and her brother Heath. Bailey and Heath’s half siblings, led by high powered district attorney Gene, are suing for their share of the inheritance. This adds a touch of intrigue to the motives of Bailey’s half sister Claire, who stays over at Bailey’s apartment for days after the attack. Is Claire sincere in wanting to help Bailey heal or is Heath right and Claire is only after Bailey’s money? This is further complicated by Heath having issues of his own — a struggling actor who is perennially stoned, Heath also happens to be best friends with Bailey’s ex-boyfriend, who still wants Bailey back and who also happens to fit the description of her attacker. Then there is Bailey’s current boyfriend, a married man with children whose identity is glaringly obvious from the beginning and yet whom Fielding for some reason coyly refuses to name until Claire’s daughter susses it out. Finally, there is the man Bailey, Claire and Jade call Narcissus, the vain neighbour who parades naked in front of his open window and appears to know that Bailey is watching him.

There’s a lot going on, and while it’s easy enough to keep the characters straight, it can also be somewhat frustrating to see so many potential red herrings in the mystery. That’s actually a credit to Fielding’s writing, as it mirrors the frustration Bailey and other attack victims must feel themselves, where fear can take many forms, even among those familiar to you. That being said, there appears to be enough drama without adding so many subplots to the mix.

There’s a great moment near the end where Bailey realizes she may never know who her attacker is, and that she would just have to make her peace with that. I love that, because it shows an unfortunate reality of some victims, and it also takes the story back to Bailey’s psychological state rather than the physical investigation of potential attackers.

The ending as a whole felt overly convoluted. The first big reveal in particular seemed complicated, and while I admit it could have happened, the soap operatic nature of this twist detracted from the very real drama of dealing with an attack. The second reveal then felt anticlimactic, almost unnecessary after the dramatic impact of the first. That being said, I may be biased because I wasn’t happy to learn who the villains were, mostly because I had grown to like these characters earlier on. And that too is a testament to Fielding’s writing.

Someone is Watching is Joy Fielding’s 25th thriller, which is pretty awesome. If you’re a fan of her books, or of thrillers in general, this is definitely one to pick up. An entertaining read overall.

Thanks to Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Review | Black Dog Summer, Miranda Sherry

Posted on 9 February 2015 by Jaclyn

When Sally is brutally murdered on her farming commune in South Africa, her spirit remains tethered to this world and the people she left behind. Similar to The Lovely Bones, Miranda Sherry’s debut novel Black Dog Summer is about a family dealing with grief and, more significantly, with all the issues left unresolved before death. Sally watches as her teenage daughter Gigi falls into a deep depression alleviated only by drugs. Her estranged sister Adele, her brother-in-law and unrequited love Liam, and their daughter Bryony are all struggling to come to terms with Sally’s death, and with the addition of a silent, troubled teen into their home.

Sherry’s writing is beautiful, and I love how she describes her characters’ lives as threads of stories that Sally must follow before she can move on. Sherry also weaves in a bit of a supernatural feel — the darkness Bryony senses in the aftermath of her aunt’s murder takes the form of a black dog out to harm her and her cousin. Bryony’s next door neighbour Lesedi is a reluctant sangoma, someone in touch with the spiritual realm and can communicate with the dead, and anchors the story’s shifting between both worlds.

My favourite passage in the novel comes early on, almost immediately after Sally is killed. She hears a noise, a “whispering, humming, singing, screaming awfulness.” She soon realizes that

The noise comes from Africa’s stories being told. Millions upon millions of them, some told in descending liquid notes like the call of the Burchells’ coucal before the rain, and some like the dull roar of Johannesburg traffic. Some of these stories are ancient and wear fossilized coats of red dust, and others are so fresh that they gleam with umbilical wetness…

[My family’s story is] just one story amongst millions, and yet it has become so loud now that it drowns out the others. It is howling at me, raging, demanding my attention. I look closer to find that this small, bright thread of story weaves out from the moment of my passing and seems to tether me to this place. Perhaps this is why I have not left yet. Perhaps I have no choice but to follow the story to its end.

Isn’t that beautiful? From that passage on, like Sally, I too felt compelled to follow this story to its end.

I also really like how Sherry connects the spirit world with the elemental one. Sally feels her being a spirit most keenly when Lesedi looks at her, and ironically, she is both most disconnected from the physical world and intimately connected to its elements. She has become an Ancestor, one with the millions upon millions of stories of the past and connected as well somehow to the potential of the future. What a beautiful way to think of the afterlife!

Black Dog Summer is a very emotional book. Much of the story within the physical world is told through Bryony’s point of view, and as a tween, she is barely able to cope with what has happened to her aunt. She looks up the term “massacre” in the dictionary, and repeats this definition several times. And indeed, when faced with something as incomprehensible as murder (not just murder, but mass murder), when having to deal with the overwhelming grief of a cousin you barely know who is now your roommate, when unable to comprehend the rising tensions between your parents, how can anyone cope?

This is a beautiful, heartbreaking, page turner of a book. Like Sally, we as readers are invested in the story while necessarily being detached from it. And like Sally, all we can do is hope it all works out for this family.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Please note that the passage quoted above is from the ARC, and may be edited prior to publication.