Book: Sharp Objects
Author: Gillian Flynn
Published: Thompson Gale (2006)
Pages: 413
OH MY GOD THIS IS SO MUCH BETTER.
Seriously. All the random snark and hostility from Gone
Girl? Here it builds actual character, and it cracks to show vulnerability, and
the main character has secrets that she totally hints at the whole time and
that all builds into a nice giant snowball of a Mommy Dearest sort of ending,
and WHY DID EVERYONE MAKE HER SHITTY BOOK HER FAMOUS ONE?
There’s this mid-tier newspaper reporter living her shabby,
lonely life in Chicago who gets an assignment to go cover the start of a serial
murder in her hometown. She doesn’t especially want to dive back into the place
she left for a reason, but she likes her editor enough to half-heartedly want
to keep him happy, and she figures maybe her old scares have healed. Boy was
she wrong!
And yes, it gets batshit crazy by the end, but dammit, this
narrative earns that batshit crazy ending like a champ. Her past trauma is
slowly pulled out of her and put to good use, and even as she frankly
acknowledges and cringes at her faults, the protagonist shows she’s at least
trying to grow out of the bad habits that kept her demons at bay, and when she
fails it’s because she’s human and not because the plot needed her to trip up. Yay!
I’m so excited that this second chance has paid off. That
doesn’t happen a hell of a lot; I don’t take second chances on authors when I
read something shitty of theirs first, but I put all three of Flynn’s novels on
hold at my library at the same time because I was something ridiculous like 50th
in line for Gone Girl so I figured I’d read whatever came first.
And then Sharp Objects came along and I figured I’d try it
anyway because it just seems rude to ignore my holds. Library etiquette wins
the day.
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