Month: January 2015

Review: The Returned

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Review for “The Returned” by Jason Mott

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

(Spoilers ahoy!)

I got through about 175 pages of this book before I stopped.

It starts off interesting and intriguing enough—long dead people, for some unknown reason, begin to come back to life. Why they have returned and how they become one of the Returned is never explained. The book makes it clear that they are not zombies, and that they look and function as normal people despite the fact that they’ve died, in many cases, years before. They reappear years later, often half a world away from where they died, and a government agency known as the ‘Bureau’ returns them to their families. The book takes off with this and then, well….that’s it.

The majority of the story is told through Lucille and Harold Hargreaves, an elderly couple in rural America whose 8 year old son Jacob is returned after drowning over 40 years ago. Lucille happily picks up parenting where she left off, while Harold broods over it for several chapters. Their son Jacob is, well…Jacob. He tells corny jokes and eats his mom’s cooking. But that’s about it. He’s the boring-est resurrected person alive (literally). What is the author’s point of writing this novel if the main character at the heart of the mystery never says anything—about death or life or how they got there in the first place? The point where I stopped reading is when Jacob is eventually locked in an internment camp and is asked the same how-and-why questions by soldiers that he couldn’t answer from the beginning. Obviously the author is trying to make some political point here with the internment angle, but I could have cared less. If nothing behind the mystery of The Returned is ever revealed, what is the point of locking him up? Yawn.

I guess I expected more from this book. It is the same book, apparently, that the current ABC show “Resurrection” is based upon, and the ho-hum nature of this book doesn’t make me want to watch the show to find out either. There was no momentum and the story fell flat. I wanted science to make an appearance, to say something (anything!) to make this book readable but it didn’t. None of the characters had any real life to them at all. Ugh.

Review: Ugly Girls

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Review for “Ugly Girls” by Lindsay Hunter
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Man, I loved this book…

On the surface it’s the story of two teenaged girls getting into shit–stealing cars, joyriding in the middle of the night, skipping class. Perry and Baby Girl are young, hard, ruthless, and completely impulsive, doing whatever thrill that feels best at the moment. Their friendship is one of convenience, one constantly pushing the other into one bad choice after the next. Baby Girl is physically ugly (her hair is shaved completely off) and Perry is emotionally ugly, living with her spineless stepfather and a drunk mother who doesn’t seem to give a damn what’s she’s up to.

Their adventures in mischief become child’s play when the two of them discover that they’re both being chatted up by the same guy online–a creepy local pedophile who has an obsession with Perry. As the book progresses and the danger edges closer and closer you know that the situation will not go well–and it doesn’t.

As I said before, I loved this book. The writing completely captured me from the beginning and didn’t let up until the end. The ending was a bit abrupt, but Hunter’s prose makes it forgiveable. I found myself underlining and rereading section after section, just because the words were so achingly beautiful. This book is unapologetic and totally worth a space on your reading list.

Review: This Wicked World

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Review for ‘This Wicked World’ by Richard Lange
Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Richard Lange is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. I loved his short story collection “Dead Boys” and his second book, “Angel Baby.” His writing is decent and his characters are always oddly compelling, so I had to backtrack a bit and read his first book, which brings me to this review. The story focuses on Jimmy Boone, an ex Marine and ex con who is hired to find out what happened in the death of a Guatemalan immigrant. In the process of his investigation he uncovers a dogfighting ring run by a group of vicious criminals, a scheme to counterfeit cash, and begins seeing a nice girl in the process.

Although the writing is passable and Lange manages to compel you to turn the page to find out what happens next, this book is loaded with problems. As an ex con on parole wanting to keep his nose clean, Jimmy Boone kept behaving in ways that were completely implausible. The mystery of what happens to the Guatemalan immigrant is solved fairly early on, a little over midway through the novel. Boone’s choice to continue to “investigate” for another 150 pages by sticking his nose into matters that don’t concern him simply make no sense. It’s like the classic scene of a bad horror movie when the horny teenagers go into the woods with condoms and beer and you’re shaking your head because you know fuckery and doom will follow. Yet Boone does it anyway, and it serves no purpose other than to drive a weak plot forward.

The last one hundred pages are a waste that further plunges the book downward into a mess. It is clear that Lange felt the need to wrap up every open plot end, no matter how useless and bad it was to begin with. It is unbelievable that a side character does a complete 180 and tries to screw Boone over with a half assed kidnap job or the fact that two of his friends (more characters wanting to stay “clean”) suddenly feel compelled to join his misguided cause. There were also lengthy passages describing brutal dog fights that did not seem to function to move the plot forward at all. I found myself skipping over pages and pages of gory details describing pit bulls ripping each other to pieces that, quite frankly, did not enlighten me any further into why Lange went with the dogfighting angle in the first place.

Lange is an excellent writer but the fact that this is his first book clearly shows here. I’ll continue to read whatever he writes, but I’d skip this book if I were you.