I really like Books A Million. More specifically, I really like their discount section. I tend to get stuck in the same rotation of “just fantasy, please” book selections and don’t usually willingly try crime dramas, but when The Madness of Crowds is $8 for a pretty hefty hardback, I say “why not.”
This is the first book that I have wilfully decided not to finish.
I mean, I’ve DNF’d books before, but that’s mostly because I just couldn’t be fucked to read them, I got bored with them, or I simply forgot I was reading them.
However, I am easy to please and I can overlook poor prose (Brian Herbert with Paul of Dune or S. A. Chakraborty with City of Brass) as long as the setting, the characters, the concept, etc are engaging. I normally only need one.
Louise Penny’s prose was so jarring (mid paragraph tangents about the current thought of her character or 3 paragraph introductions about how this insignificant character got to Three Pines in the middle of a scene) that it completely destroyed all of the characters for me.
The “reveal” of the statistician’s solution to “just fucking kill everyone that needs to go to the hospital and any fetuses with birth defects” (I’m guessing, someone’s already tried to kill her and I still don’t know what she’s actually fucking saying but EVERY CHARACTER DOES AND HATES HER FOR IT) is pointless and feels really heavy handed, like she’s railing against liberal politics in general. Also, the statistician may or may not have been killed by the time I decided to abandon the book. It was a very non-committal scene and then no one mentioned a murder since that point, so…🤷♂️
And then there was the self-righteous asshole of a nobel peace prize winner, which itself feels very political.
In all, I am shocked that Penny wrote this book, an editor looked at it, gave the go ahead, and then a publisher actually printed it. The only thing I can guess that allowed this to be printed is the fact that she’s had successful books in the past, and several parties (herself included) simply saw this book as an easy paycheck.
I was immensely disappointed with the result.
tldr: Don’t waste your time.
by AndrewTheGuru
2 Comments
Was this the first Louise Penny book you tried?
Completely agree with you.
This book reads like an unwelcome contractual obligation. If I had read it earlier in my Louise Penny exploration I would never have read another one.
The one with “Hillary Rodham Clinton” also sucked big fuckin’ time.
Otherwise, and since, she’s superb. The best. WTF?