Natalie M. (HBNole) reviewed Memoir should be believable on 11/12/2008 + 53 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 3

This book starts out with a description of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in L.A. Unfortunately for the author, I also lived through this earthquake. (In fact, I was much closer to the epicenter than she was.) Within the first five pages I found many exaggerations and errors related to the reporting of her experience of this event. (One example, she says "many" people died in this quake because they had no earthquake plan. In point of fact, only 57 deaths were attributed to the quake and most of them were in collapsed apartment buildings which left them no time to react even if they'd had a plan.) Her story was so skewed that I realized the author could not be trusted to be telling an entirely truthful tale. If she fudged facts for the sake of adding drama to an event that millions of people shared with her, how true would her personal, hard-to-verify story be? Life is too short for me to read fiction masked as memoir. And even fiction needs to be believable.

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