Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

For all the positive page-play this novel has gotten in book reviews, I'm frankly embarassed for the author, who clearly has ambition but stands in the literary spotlight denuded of any real talent. Stylistically it mirrors much of its setting: after the 50th overstretched simile you feel like you're droning along through the bleak, snoozy highway stretches of middle America that serve as Dad-n-Daughter's domestic domain (Pessl, 2006, Exercises in Excessive, Extemporaneous Alliteration). The annotation concept, which could have been a brilliant tool (see Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962), turns out to be as insipid and heavy as all the third-rate citizens of the book that Blue takes every opportunity to dismiss with endless, uninsightful criticism. After a few chapters of her tedious (and except for a few funny examples, wholly dull) asides, you start to feel like you're trapped in a corner with a storyteller who endlessly tacks on irrelevant details and tangents just to hear more of her own voice. If the book's biggest crime is that it's Boring, BORING, the great injustice to its readers is that it's utterly hollow and overblown (Eggshell Christmas Ornaments, The Kitchen Craft Guide Vol 3, Issue 1, 1999). The overall voice is gimmicky and juvenile, and I guess it should be the latter, given the age of the narrator, but Pessl failed to endow Blue with any of the epic depth and/or complex combination of youthful innocence/cunning that characterizes great, young, female protagonists (see Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, Mitchell, 1936 and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee, 1962). Instead, Blue's stuck in a shallow, sticky, pimpled regime of self-righteousness of the very sort Gareth would attack in his un-funny, tries-way-too-hard-to-be-profound-and-charming way. Like wooden Gareth, pretty much every character is a hasty patchwork of physical characteristics and told-but-not-shown veneers of inner character (Fabulous Facades: Creative Window Treatments, 2001). After spending 500+ pages with Blue, there aren't any words I would use in her epitaph except for tedious & shallow. That's too bad, given the narrative territory Pessl set out to cover (The Blunders of Wunderauthors, 2006).