Sharp Objects: A Novel
by Gillian Flynn
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Book Reviews of Sharp Objects: A Novel
Book Review: Uncomfortably compulsive reading
Summary: 4 Stars
First Line: My sweater was new, stinging red and ugly.
Not all that long ago Camille Preaker was a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Now she's a reporter for a second-rate Chicago newspaper. Her first assignment? To go back home to Wind Gap, Missouri, to cover the murders of two young girls.
Although the police think that the killer is a transient, Camille believes a local is responsible. As she interviews old acquaintances and newcomers, she begins reliving her childhood and uncovering long-buried secrets in her family.
This was a very uncomfortable book for me to read. Although I try my best not to give away plot points, this book has been out for about four years, and what I'm about to say is nothing that can't be found in any review at Amazon. The razor blade on the cover of Sharp Objects isn't there merely for decoration. The reason why Camille was in a psychiatric hospital is because she's a cutter. Reading about Camille's preference for self-harm not only gave me the creeps, it strongly reminded me of my own battles with severe depression. (In my own case, I was in so much mental pain that picturing chopping off my hand with a meat cleaver was seductive, and I actually believed that it would feel good.) Although I'm well past that, the memories are very easily brought to the surface.
As I met the members of Camille's family, I wanted to drag her out of that house and never let her return. Mental illness had made that place a dead zone, my skin was itching fiercely, and I found the pages more and more difficult to turn.
My strong reactions may give you the impression that the book is poorly written. It is not. On the contrary-- to produce such strong emotions in me, I would say that it's very well written. The only real weakness I found in Sharp Objects was the fact that Flynn's attempts at misdirection did not work with me. Early on I'd homed in on the murderer like a guided missile, and Flynn could not shake me.
After turning the last page, I felt as though I needed a stiff drink or a strong tranquilizer. I haven't felt that way in a very long time. If Flynn's second novel, Dark Places, is anything like her first, I'm not at all sure that I'll read it. I think my grandfather would call that a back-handed compliment!
Book Review: Enthralling read
Summary: 5 Stars
Gillian Flynn is a tremendous writer. Her writing is interesting, clean, and captures the audience well with such articulated imagery. She has a style that is dark, comic, and suspenseful. Her character development is true--you feel like you know them.
In Sharp Objects, the reader is introduced to Camille Preaker, a thirty something journalist from a second rate Chicago newspaper. Plucked from the drudgery of her day to day existence, her editor tells her to go home and investigate the murder and disappearance of two girls. Not such an easy task, as Flynn develops two simultaneous stories: a family life that looks perfect, but is anything but: Camille is a cutter (but not an ordinary cutter), her sister Marion died young and this is something no one in the family has dealt with properly, and her mother is the perfection in public, but in private you can sense her hatred. This family drama slowly creeps into the story as Camille does return to small town Missouri. Ingratiating herself back as a townie to gain confidence and access to the confused/devastated small town, Camille experiences more than her family and job demands: she develops a crush on a detective. All this as we follow Camille get deeper into the case, and in to her mother's home: it is a suspenseful novel that will keep you guessing.
I personally found the intersecting stories developed the narrative. I also found her discussion of mother-daughter relationships to be stark and developed. She goes into familiar territory, but describes it like nothing I have read before. There was an immense possibility for this novel to be a string of clichés, but Flynn is so fresh and dynamic. She allows you to see a killer in everyone, and then wallop you with more shocking revelations. This book will deliver! Highly recommended. Also check out her sophomore triumph: Dark Places: A Novel, a different story, but with all the suspense and twists of Sharp Objects.
Book Review: A Blazing, Bizarre Triumph
Summary: 5 Stars
Reading "Sharp Objects," I found I didn't want to like it. I was put off by its gothic, stoic fatalism, by the strange unreliability of its narrator and main character, Camille Preaker, and by its nightmare gallery of sad, manic small-town oddballs.
I was put off by those things, yet I could not stop reading "Sharp Objects," because I had no idea where it might be going ... and at some point, I was dimly aware that I cared very deeply about what might happen to the strange, horrible, not-quite-hopeless people of Wind Gap, Missouri. Even as they did things that made me cringe with almost every turn of a page.
Author Gillian Flynn, in an absolute winner of a debut novel, creates a bizarre, skewed, wonderful world of awful people who either don't really want to be awful or really aren't entirely to blame for their awfulness. It is largely a world of girls and women, but "Sharp Objects" is no chick-lit that a fan of Jennifer Weiner or even Jodi Picoult would recognize. It takes us to some casual and disturbing extremes, wrapping a serial-murder mystery in the suffocating blanket of a small town that is content to suffocate on itself.
Camille Preaker, with one foot in the insanity and one foot out (maybe), is a blazing original of a character, screwed up on many levels but trying her damnedest not to allow the word "hopelessly" be attached to that label. Her willingness to explore the depths of her dysfunction makes her, in a way, a brilliant reporter, more so than most ... because, how can we tell the truth about the ugliness of the world if we cannot tell the ugly truth about ourselves first?
I'm not sure I'd want to read "Sharp Objects" twice. But I wouldn't hesitate for a minute to suggest that you read it once. Especially if you've been lulled into complacency by formula murder-mystery stories. This novel is a necessary slap across the face of complacency.
Book Review: Kind of "Bette Davis-ish"
Summary: 4 Stars
I picked this book up on one of my recent book-buying sprees; who can resist a great book sale? AND .. well, I liked the cover :)
So ... how do I go about reviewing this without spoilers? Camille is a cutter (which doesn't really count as a spoiler, as we find this out very early on). She cuts words into her flesh, which is enough to weird you out, but when we meet her MOTHER, we're REALLY weirded out. As I read this book, I kept thinking "This would have made a great Bette Davis movie". It was creepy like that.
I LIKED this book; it was entertaining and quick to read, AND it has some twists and turns that you don't see coming (and a couple that you kind of do). YOU see what the truth is before Camille does, and you're hoping against hope that her strange mother and her ineffectual enabler stepfather don't break Camille before she gets to the truth. Her sister Amma makes "Mean Girls" look like they don't have a clue as to the mean game, and Camille is feeling the oddmeister vibe, even though she's trying not to.
All in all, I'd give it a thumbs up.
Sensitive reader: There are some ticklish spots here. Read the first quote below; if you can stand that, you can probably take the rest of the book.
QUOTES:
"I'm on the police beat, so probably the same kind of junk you see: abuse, rape, murder." I wanted him to know I had horror stories too. Foolish, but I indulged. "Last month it was an eighty-two-year-old man. Son killed him, then left him in a bathtub of Drano to dissolve. Guy confessed, but, of course, couldn't come up with a reason for doing it."
"Camille, do you ever feel like bad things are going to happen, and you can't stop them? You can't do anything, you just have to wait?"
"Anyway, me and Rae pulled Ann off and Natalie had this needle sticking right out of her cheek just an inch below her eye."
Book Review: Sharp writing but painful, unoriginal plot
Summary: 2 Stars
As the readers are gratuitously reminded, Sharp Objects' 'protagonist' Camille Preaker is, as can be guessed by the title, a cutter who is deeply conflicted. Her job as a journalist in Chicago, to her chagrin, brings her a murder story from her humble hometown, Wind Gap, Missouri, which requires her to return for a brief stay to report on the murders. As is customary, her visit turns out to last longer than she expected and she, sooner or later, has to 'confront her demons'.
Unfortunately, the ability to predict the main character's compulsive habit from the title turns out to be a harbinger for the predictability of the novel in general. The ending can be easily surmised early on, which leaves the reader to struggle through chapter after chapter of relentless small town shenanigans and stupidity that quickly begin to test their patience. Every last character is annoyingly obtuse and oblivious, and the fact that they all swear, drink excessively, do drugs, or partake in one or more other forms of debauchery grows tiresome.
As mentioned before, the ending is quite forseeable, and, I might add, prosaic, not making the enervating process of reading the novel worth it in the end, as readers may hope. No significant revelations are made in the also aforementioned perfunctory 'confronting of demons', and the only thing "shocking" or "disturbing" about the novel, as so many critics raved passionately, is that the main character is as dense and, quite frankly, slow as she is. In short, Sharp Objects insults the readers' intelligence.
The only thing that drags the overly-praised novel up to my assigned rating of two stars is Gillian Flynn's evident talent. Flynn's figurative language and characterization are perfectly matched to the small town milieu and occasionally evoke emotion from the reader. I hope her writing aplomb is better fitted to a less contrived plot in her next novel.