The
question is, “Why is this book a Sonoma County Library Selection of the
Month?”. It clearly is a terrible selection for a sophisticated and learned
group of readers like ours at the local Guerneville library.
In
street parlance, “This book sucks!”
There
are two stylistic reasons for my denigration of this book and its author. But,
before I get into those, let me clarify a minor effrontery to our readership
group.
Periodically
Lucy, the alter ego of the author let’s go with a salvo of thoughts that she has
(or she thinks the readership should have), killing any suspense in the plot
line progression. The author over-clarifies what is happening.
My
minor set of problems with this book is clarity of purpose – what is this book
about? It has excessively many issues: drugs, cartels, money, scams, FBI, DEA,
politicians, perverts, marines. … .. The writing’s Point Of View passes from
one to another across more than a dozen people. Was this a draft, tossing the
spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck? It has some of the makings of a good
guy - bad guy story, but everyone has so many flaws, I can’t get behind any of
them. Maybe Mary, the kid in the bus in the opening, who hugged Isaac Harris;
she was transparent.
My
major problem with the book is the plethora of characters introduced. And they
are only introduced. 44 of the
85 characters introduced in the first third (12 of 38 chapters) of the book only
appear in their introductory chapter. This appears to be a consistent pattern.
Interestingly, 6-7 characters appear consistently in over half the chapters, as
one might expect in a normal novel. I am suspicious that this trend will
continue throughout the book. She’s introducing 5-6 characters a chapter
consistently, without let-up. It appears to me as stylistic, possibly cultural,
almost as if necessary to identify, in detail, every child, aunt and/or uncle
connected to the main characters, no matter how inconsequential.
It
crosses my mind that the author owes friends, family, and neighbor’s mentions
in their books in order to maintain their good standing as an author, or a
friend. The 44 characters with a single line in a single chapter place an undue
burden of the readership. Do these characters matter? Will they come back in
later? Is there a clue here that I am missing? The rate of character
introduction is so consistent and predictable that we will have over two
hundred characters by book’s end; a hundred of them passing fancies.
