Sharp Objects

Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming.


This book is what I consider on the high end of "satisfactory". It was good, I enjoyed reading it, but there were a few personal things that stopped me from REALLY enjoying and loving this book. I picked it up because there has been a lot of hype about Gillian Flynn's most recent work, Gone Girl. It's already been slated to become a movie, and I was interested in reading her other stuff before getting on to Gone Girl. I will read it, but not yet. 

The first thing that really stuck out for me was the small town aspect of the story. I am not from a small town, I am a city girl through and through, so I felt while reading about the different aspects of a small town, I just didn't "get it". Perhaps it was that I had never experienced such things, or perhaps Flynn really didn't explain it well enough for me to feel as though I was there. There were some things that I felt had to be exaggerations of how people really are in small towns, but I wasn't entirely sure. Perhaps everyone knows someone in a small town that is in denial about everything going wrong around them? A young woman that was born and raised, and had never left the town, so even though these horrible things are going on she can't imagine moving her family elsewhere? A woman that would state "You don't understand how we feel [about these murdered girls]. You're not a mom." As if one needs to be a parent to feel remorse for a dead child... I don't know. Maybe that's reasonable to see, maybe it's not. Maybe the author was trying to make this town an exception,... in any case, I felt I was missing out on the punchline.

I found the mother-daughter relationships in this book totally heartbreaking. There were the examples in the periphery of mothers who's children were just trophies to be taken pictures of and hung on the wall, not much actual parenting going on. Then there was the main character and her mom. I felt a little piece of myself die when this mother states to her grown up daughter "I think I finally realized why I don't love you". Honestly, this is a horrible woman, and the daughter's not really a catch herself, but my heart still broke into a million pieces just reading those words. I know that these kinds of relationships happen in real life, but man! To have someone write them down, or say them out loud... I was successfully shocked and saddened. I seriously think that that is the cruelest thing you could ever say to a child, even if it's true. Even if s/he doesn't love you either.

The other disconcerting thing was the general, overall inappropriateness in this novel. I understand that this is her debut novel, and in order to make it in a very saturated industry, you need to present something different that hasn't been done before. So... I get it. But this main character woman is just slightly older than me, and she's hanging out with her 13-year old sister, doing drugs with her, and sleeping with her (past the age of maturity) teenage friends. It's pretty gross... and seriously, she needs to grow the hell up! What is wrong with this girl? I could not imagine even considering doing the things this girl does that are so juvenile and beneath her. Does this go back to the small town thing I don't understand, or is her sister just THAT manipulative (entirely possible, but still)

I don't really read much Mystery, but I think this is classified as one... little girls are murdered, things happen, it's solved in the end, yippee-ky-eh! Mystery novel. So that also may be a failing of mine. This book seems like it's a bit different from most mysteries, but the plot devices are still relatively similar.

The main character wasn't totally awful, but she was very flawed. You root for her even if she does insane things. She also is a pretty sympathetic character, with her mental illness background and good intentions, just very flawed.

I plan on reading more of Flynn's stuff in the future, and this one is worth a read. It's a compelling story, just be prepared for the difficult themes and topics.