Sharp Objects: A Novel
by Gillian Flynn
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gillian FlynnEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-07-31
ISBN: 0307341550
Number of pages: 254
Publisher: Broadway
Book Reviews of Sharp Objects: A Novel
Book Review: "It is impossible to compete with the dead. I wish I could stop trying."
Summary: 5 Stars
Horror skates blithely through this novel, surfacing periodically in frissons of malice. This author enjoys a special talent: the painful excavation of the female psyche. Women receive no special treatment, are expertly dissected, demystifying the myth of kindness and comfort associated with females. As in Dark Places, Flynn's female characters are unpredictable, unlikable, often intimidating, sometimes violent. This grim view of womankind continues in Sharp Objects, as reporter Camille Preaker is sent on assignment by her third-rate Chicago newspaper, The Daily Post, to cover the death of a young girl and the disappearance of another in her home town of Wind Gap, Missouri. Staying with family, mother, step-father and thirteen-year-old step-sister, Amma, does not make for a happy homecoming. Rather, a tension-filled, antagonistic atmosphere permeates the family home, a pristine Victorian house filled with expensive objects and bad intentions.
Clearly, Camille has private demons, not the least of which is a dependency on alcohol to soften the edges of reality and a compulsive scribbling of words on her wrist, as though to seal them in memory. As Camille works her sources, forced to confront her past in Wind Gap, one death becomes two when the missing child is found, both children bearing a common horrifying mutilation. Camille interviews old friends and former acquaintances, the reluctant families of the dead girls, a Kansas City cop brought in on the case. Here is troubled territory, indeed. Meanwhile, Camille's distant mother refuses to tolerate the ugliness her daughter brings into her carefully controlled environment. Under her mother's roof, a long dead younger sibling competes with an enigmatic half-sister, a changeling who is a sweet, compliant daughter at home, a wild, cruel creature in the world. Menace bubbles just beneath the surface, a thin veneer of domesticity hiding family secrets deep and dark.
Not for the faint of heart, Flynn writes with the ferocity of a feral child. Reduced to the helpless pawn of a controlling mother, Camille flails about, discovering facts about the murders that threaten to unravel her hard-won peace of mind. While the police favor a transient or the brother of one of the victims, Camille is pulled in an entirely different direction. At one point I found this dance on the dark side nearly unbearable, a nightmare of past and present, unresolved issues and night terrors, Camille's only defense to drink herself into oblivion. In Flynn's disturbing, unforgettable thriller, every place has its own brand of violence, comfort is transient and terror waits patiently on the other side of the door. Luan Gaines/2009.
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