PoeticaL
cluttering the net since 2001

the life before her eyes (book review)

Friday, Nov. 29, 2002

I read this book in one day. The reviews on amazon for it were very high ranking. But I found it on my own at the bookstore on Wednesday afternoon. I got out of work at noon and decided to trek my way to Clearwater and check out the bigger barnes and noble up there. I cruised around that place peacefully for quite a few hours. I would have gone and picked up Bucky but he was at a Chucky Cheese outing with his tae kwon doe pals.

So onto my review of this book�..

The first chapter of this novel is about two girls in a highschool bathroom, a fellow teenage student walks in carrying a gun and asks them which of them shall die? One girl simply says �kill her� and points to her best friend. He does.

The first chapter is amazingly well written and sends you fast forward into reading the rest. There are about ten inconsistencies in the story and most of it is written in a poetic style that leaves you the reader as the only one to interpret exactly what she is referring to. The ending is amazingly badly written. You are left with about a dozen questions to decipher yourself. Some of these questions are enough to destroy the whole novel if you think too hard about it all.

My first thought was to read the entire thing again and try to piece it all together. Maybe someday. I would however recommend it if you like to read interesting prose. I can only wish to write a style so engaging myself. The book overall is well written and interesting. There are just a few things that are left dangling in the air and that�s irritating to me. There should be some sort of conclusion. It also seems to me that she gets to the end of the novel and rushes to be done. Like she herself got tired of the whole thing and said, �oh shit, I guess I�ll end this book right now.� And she did it without much forethought.

One major thing that kept urking me was that she had her main 40 yr old character constantly referring to her teenage years and they included such artists and songs from the likes of Jewel and yet that is current. So what? Did this 40 yr old character live in the year 2020+ and if so why the hell did she still drive a minivan? Won�t we be past that by then?

These are all things I have started to question about novels because I am spending time writing my own. Inconsistencies suck. I never noticed them before until I myself learned to fear them.

Either way, I read it in a day and it kept my attention. I�d recommend it. If you read the first chapter, you�ll buy the book.

The one thing that saved this book for me was her constantly referring to a patch of daisies near the front of her house as though they were not inanimate but rather human with emotion.

"Maybe it hadn't been the daisies that had bothered her. It was just their crowded conditions. Still, slumped from the rain, they already seemed to be stirring, turning their faces toward her, or toward the sun."

"Beside her in the dark Paul could have been anyone.
She could have been anyone.
She'd changed the sheets after dinner, so there wasn't even the familiar smell of their bodies. Instead there was the scent of fabric softener, powdered flowers."


She just knows how to string words together like pretty charms dangling from a sentence. So this book gets my thumbs up!
5:30 p.m. ::
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