Review for “Sweet Lamb of Heaven” by Lydia Millet (2016)
Rating: none
DNF’d at 60% in my Kindle.
I’ve been on a DNF kick lately, stopping books left and right because, well, f**k it…I have the power of Grayskull and I can. My TBR pile is a beast right now, and I firmly believe that life’s too short for bad books, slow books, stupid books, books with no point. DNF is not always a bad thing: sometimes I’ll stop reading because I just can’t get into it right then (not the right mood, season, or mindset) and I’ll come back to it a year or two later and it’s the best thing I’ve ever read. It’s happened before. I normally don’t review DNF books, because I try to bring you complete and thorough reviews, but it was clear with this one that what I got was all I was going to get.
Anywho, at the beginning of this book we meet Anna, who is pregnant with a child that her dick of a husband, Ned, does not want. She has the child anyway, a daughter she names Lena. She eventually chalks up the loss of the marriage and leaves Ned and moves across the country to Maine. Ever since the birth of her daughter, Anna has been hearing a voice that only occurs when her daughter is around. Throughout this book are blurbs from Wikipedia and other sources on what could possibly be the source of the voice–psychosis, possession by demons, etc. It’s boring to read. Ned eventually catches up with Anna, and about here was where I stopped reading.
As far as the writing, it’s actually good. It rambles at times, a stream-of-consciousness kinda style that never really grew on me. Because the main character hears voices only when her daughter is around, there’s a heavy case here for an unreliable narrator. There is a sense of foreboding and dread, which was very skillfully played all throughout this book, but that was about it for me. This novel is being marketed as a psychological thriller–and in a way, it is that–but there was never a ‘thrill’ here for me, just circles of weirdness and Wikipedia entries and me wondering if I should even continue to bother with Anna because I don’t know if she is crazy or not.
Another reason I am reviewing this book (even though I didn’t finish it) is because I do recommend that people out there read it. If possible, please report to me what you got out of it, if anything at all. Pretty pretty please…
[Note: I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley and W.W. Norton Publishers in exchange for an honest review of this book.]
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