Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you are a literate, well-read person who has enjoyed dozens of ingeniously crafted mysteries and thrillers with masterful character development: This is NOT the book for you! The droves of enthusiastic editorial reviews are quite misleading, much to my surprise and consternation. If you are going to read any review before deciding whether to give this book a try, I urge you to read the one by A. Grace, an Amazon Vine reviewer, whose trenchant comments provide a very accurate summary of an unusually annoying book.. Just to confirm, this is a thoroughly contrived novel which relies on overly convenient omissions, transpositions of time, and other manipulative tactics to lead the reader down the garden path. (No sooner have you begun plowing through the book, it seems, than the author throws in a sudden hunk of backstory from the previous year -- generally a major taboo in fiction writing, which should be defied, if at all, for a higher purpose than to manipulate and confuse the reader.) The tale has no sympathetic protagonist to root for. The three semi-indistinguishable narrators are uniformly dreary and, for the most part, self-obsessed women who have traded in self-determination and the pursuit of meaningful lives for an anachronistic dependency on men. (Typical of this trendy new genre, the men in the book are, of course, all referred to as "men," and the women as "girls.") It seems telling that 1,207 readers have highlighted the following passage in the Kindle edition: "I can't do this, I can't just be a wife. I don't understand how anyone does it -- there is literally nothing to do but wait. Wait for a man to come home and love you. Either that or look around for something to distract you." (And by the way, while I'm on the subject of oft-highlighted passages, a more provocative one -- admittedly highlighted by only 184 readers to date -- is this: "Life is not a paragragh, and death is no parenthesis." Perhaps Paula Hawkins expects everyone to pick up on the allusion despite the lack of attribution, but how many readers will realize that this is a nearly verbatim quote from a poem by .e.e. cummings?) I don't know which is more demoralizing: This bleak and deceitfully constructed story, or the thought that it may encourage even more would-be authors to emulate its stylistic trickery and overall mediocrity. More discriminating readers might do better to check out some of the classic puzzlers and chillers from giants such as P.D. James, Ruth Rendell -- even Agatha Christie -- or to revisit the authentic noir available on video.