The Red Room - Nicci French
This is where I realized I can still read, and read quickly and enjoyably. I simply can't read everything any longer. This is still painful for me, and it makes me mad not to have the time and leasure and above all the energy to tackle the kind of books that don't grab you immediately but have other pleasures in store for you. Still, this doesn't mean that the books that do are somehow inferior for it. I read The Red Room in one go, as I have done for all the other Nicci French books. It moved me, it absorbed me, I admired it. It's a lot.
Nicci French is like Barbara Vine but less cold and less vicious. Her (I keep forgetting if this is the husband&wife team name or hers alone) books are usually first-person accounts, invariably from a woman's point of view, and usually involving something deeply traumatic. This time around, we have a psychologist who's been involved in an attack during a routine interview with a suspect in a police station. As soon as she's back to her job, they want her to pin a murder on her assailant... but as much as she finds him distasteful, she can't say he is the murderer.
The whole book revolves on lost people: street kids, runaways, unhappy and maladjusted people living on the borders, unable to fit in. That's ultimately more interesting and far more touching than finding out who the killer is. And the prose is funny and gentle and admirable. Good book.
8/10
This is where I realized I can still read, and read quickly and enjoyably. I simply can't read everything any longer. This is still painful for me, and it makes me mad not to have the time and leasure and above all the energy to tackle the kind of books that don't grab you immediately but have other pleasures in store for you. Still, this doesn't mean that the books that do are somehow inferior for it. I read The Red Room in one go, as I have done for all the other Nicci French books. It moved me, it absorbed me, I admired it. It's a lot.
Nicci French is like Barbara Vine but less cold and less vicious. Her (I keep forgetting if this is the husband&wife team name or hers alone) books are usually first-person accounts, invariably from a woman's point of view, and usually involving something deeply traumatic. This time around, we have a psychologist who's been involved in an attack during a routine interview with a suspect in a police station. As soon as she's back to her job, they want her to pin a murder on her assailant... but as much as she finds him distasteful, she can't say he is the murderer.
The whole book revolves on lost people: street kids, runaways, unhappy and maladjusted people living on the borders, unable to fit in. That's ultimately more interesting and far more touching than finding out who the killer is. And the prose is funny and gentle and admirable. Good book.
8/10
posted by Anna at
1:19 AM
