Helpful Score: 4
I may be the only person here who did not like this book as much as I had hoped I would. I think it was the idea that the idea was actually more interesting than the delivery.
The subtitle "A love story" is grossly understated. It seems everyone from the kids' parents down to the PI working for the defense is trying to get a little action from somewhere. It gets kind of ridiculous after awhile.
The beginning is interesting enough to get you into the story, the middle flounders, and by the end the poor misrepresented teenager who is on trial for the murder of his lifelong friend/girlfriend seems like an annoying wretch you're just kind of hoping gets locked away. I also had little sympathy for Emily (the girl who committed suicide), being it just ended up feeling like two spoiled kids gone wrong.
In the discussion part of the book Ms. Picoult said that it was just as much of a love story about Gus and Chris (mother and son) than anyone else. Really? It was hard to even really see that between Emily's parents forsaking their own marriage with hopes of trying to woo their neighbors away from their respective spouse. Chris' father, James, was also portrayed as an unbelievably cold hearted jerk but he redeems himself at the end so you feel that he got the short end of the stick in all this which I didn't like. If James was a victim, give me more than the last 3 pages of the book to say "Oh hey, he's really not so bad" which was pretty much what ended up happening.
I gave this book a 3 out of 5 because there were some qualities of the book such I liked. The emotions the parents were feeling on both sides (except Melanie Gold, Emily's mother, she just went psychotic) feasible and at some parts you kind of forgot about the 2nd rate soap opera going on and really felt your heart strings tug for them.
If you don't go into this wanting a compelling read on the subject of suicide, but a book about everyone else's drama that just somehow revolved around a suicide you can get something out of it.
The subtitle "A love story" is grossly understated. It seems everyone from the kids' parents down to the PI working for the defense is trying to get a little action from somewhere. It gets kind of ridiculous after awhile.
The beginning is interesting enough to get you into the story, the middle flounders, and by the end the poor misrepresented teenager who is on trial for the murder of his lifelong friend/girlfriend seems like an annoying wretch you're just kind of hoping gets locked away. I also had little sympathy for Emily (the girl who committed suicide), being it just ended up feeling like two spoiled kids gone wrong.
In the discussion part of the book Ms. Picoult said that it was just as much of a love story about Gus and Chris (mother and son) than anyone else. Really? It was hard to even really see that between Emily's parents forsaking their own marriage with hopes of trying to woo their neighbors away from their respective spouse. Chris' father, James, was also portrayed as an unbelievably cold hearted jerk but he redeems himself at the end so you feel that he got the short end of the stick in all this which I didn't like. If James was a victim, give me more than the last 3 pages of the book to say "Oh hey, he's really not so bad" which was pretty much what ended up happening.
I gave this book a 3 out of 5 because there were some qualities of the book such I liked. The emotions the parents were feeling on both sides (except Melanie Gold, Emily's mother, she just went psychotic) feasible and at some parts you kind of forgot about the 2nd rate soap opera going on and really felt your heart strings tug for them.
If you don't go into this wanting a compelling read on the subject of suicide, but a book about everyone else's drama that just somehow revolved around a suicide you can get something out of it.
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