Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We should start a support group for survivors of “A Little Life.” It’s unspeakably bad: One of the most hackneyed and unreadable books on the market today. There should be a law prohibiting this kind of literary fraud. Other reviewers have called out the obvious flaws, but I’ll sum up here: 1) Unbelievable characters. One example: Two people adopt the protagonist (Jude) when they hardly know him (nor does the reader). His friends all care for him to an incredible degree, but there is no reason why they would, because he’s so distant and so utterly, unbearably boring. I was bored by Jude by page 20. Only 710 pages to go! 2) Ill-defined, unbeleivable characters. For the first 200 pages you won’t be able to recall who is who. And you won’t care, frankly. All of the characters become famous, which is both unbelievable and tiresome. And there are main characters who disappear for hundreds (Hundreds! Hundreds!) of pages, only to re-appear at the very end of the book, where their presence isn’t even required. 3) Plot twists that are much too convenient. All the characters (like multiple sets of parents or guardians) who would have interfered with the narrative manage to die early, and off stage. Problem solved! 4) Repetition. Repetition. Repetition. Everybody goes to Thanksgiving dinner. There is an incident. Things get boring again. Then the protagonist goes into a depression. Everybody worries and rallies around him. Oh, time for another Thanksgiving dinner. Followed by another incident, depression, rallying, more Thanksgiving. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages of this same cycle repeated over and over. 5) Constant repetition of the words "I'm sorry.” It happens every 20-30 pages or so. Someone should do a word count on “sorry.” 6) The interminable length. Truly, didn’t anyone ever consider telling the author, “You know, you could probably cut 5 of the 15 Thanksgiving scenes” or “Maybe by removing this extraneous character who has no real purpose in the book, you could save the reader about 100 pages.” Where was the editor? There is no reason this book should have taken up this many pages—apart from the writer's laziness or ego. A good writer makes choices. And this writer made none. I read a lot. A lot. Every day. I was an English Lit major. I was an editor. Trust me: It's dreck. I have never written a review before, but I was compelled to write this one because everything about this book made me angry. It’s been over a month and I’m still angry.