Bookish Thoughts

Tana French isn't one to shy away from morally messy people. She likes taking complicated people, finding their buttons, and turning up the pressure to see whether they break or rise to the equation. I've liked a few of her protagonists, but most of them leaving me feeling off balance and a bit queasy. So it should be no surprise that Antoinette, narrator of The Tresspasser , is a difficutl character. She's angry and paranoid. The world has been hostile to her, and she responds by being hostile right back. Often proactively. It was hard to be in her head for an entire book. Honestly, her level of anger and defensiveness just exhausts me. She tries so hard to prove that she doesn't care that she ends up spending all of her time caring what people are thinking of her every minute. It's no surprise to the audience to learn that most of her squad doesn't think about her as much as she believes, and I had a particularly hard time believing that O'Neill was in o...

This book is almost too bright. Which is maybe an odd way to describe a book. It's so bright that it gives me a headache, the kind I got when I was in Alaska in June and the sun was always in my eyes. Which, again, is an odd way to describe a book that I love deeply. But it's true. The first time I read it, I had a stomach bug, so I figured that was why I felt a little off. This time through I felt fine, and I still got a headache, right at the exact same spot. This book glitters and shimmers, and it's sometimes hard to look at. But it's even harder to look away. So. Headache. My second time through this book, I got a chance to marvel at how French constructed her mystery. I was actually surprised to realize that she tells you who the author is right on the third page. Then again, much like The Secret History , this mystery is more about why than who. What did Lexie do that fractured the group? I love books that hold up well on a re-read, and I think it can be espec...

This book broke my heart. After Broken Harbor , I'd been expecting another terrifying read from Tana French. Instead I got a deeply sad tale about friendship and the things young girls will do to protect (or destroy) each other. The murder victim in this book is a teenaged boy, found on the campus of a girl's boarding school. A year after his death, the case has gone cold, until a new clue narrows the suspect pool to eight teenaged girls, and the detectives find themselves caught in a web of high school drama and endless lies, trying to tease apart exactly what happened. Reading this book, I kept thinking back to my college experience. For a few brief, shining months, I had what these girls have. A group of girl friends that you are impossibly close with. You live together and share everything. You're ride or die for each other, and it seems like it will stay that way forever. And then something goes wrong. And because everything is so heightened, it goes really wrong, an...

Tana French has a way of getting in my head and under my skin. I love her books, but they consume me. When I'm reading one, it's difficult for me to engage fully with the rest of my life. I come up for air as needed, because I do have a life outside of books. But French's books make me struggle with that. I want to linger over them, make them last as long as possible. I also find myself racing to the end, hoping that when I finally close the book I'll get myself back. That I'll be able to return to the rest of my life. Broken Harbor  was no exception. In fact, it got to me even more than usual. This book terrified me. It actually gave me nightmares. These books are not fantastical. There's nothing supernatural here, not even a whiff of magical realism. But the way French plays with your perception makes you doubt that. Just as I called The Likeness  a ghost story, on some level this is a book about a haunted house. A house haunted by all the crumbling hopes an...

The Likeness  is a deliciously claustrophobic mystery that skirts up against being a ghost story. It's haunting and lyrical. It got under my skin such that I couldn't think about anything else when I wasn't reading it, and then I couldn't sleep for thinking about it. It's rare that a novel leaks into the rest of my life the way this one did, and I absolutely loved it for it. The premise requires a significant suspension of disbelief. Detective Cassie Maddox, lately of the Murder Squard but currently working Domestic Violence began her career as an undercover agent. During that time she created the persona of Lexie Madison to infiltrate a drug ring on a college campus. When she was stabbed, she got pulled out, but the identity was left live in case they needed her again. So imagine her surprise when, several years later, Lexie Madison turns up dead. With no leads, Cassie agrees to go undercover again, under very different circumstances this time. So yeah, that in...

I should read more mysteries. I was very resistant to the idea of mysteries a few years ago, but I think that's because my experience with the genre began and ended with Dan Brown. As lauded as he is (or was), he doesn't write very good mysteries. I always figured out the answer before the characters, and then felt like the characters were stupid for not seeing the answer. But it turns out that there's a lot of really good mysteries out there that do keep me guessing until the end. The latest of these is Tana French's In the Woods , which kicks off the Dublin Murder Squad series. Although I get the impression that each novel in the series centers on a different protagonist, making the location rather than the detective the connective tissue. It's an idea that intrigues me, and I liked the first one enough to track down then next, if only to read more of French's writing. She crafts a great mystery here, that delves into psychological thriller territory. The ...