
Some publications can be relied on to write thoughtful reviews.
Here is one from Salon magazine.
Below is a bad one from a reader on the Amazon site
Sebold demonstrates a stunning capacity to combine all the worst aspects of American culture into a single novel - materialism, cheap religion, shallow psychotherapy, and a vigilante obsession with rare and violent crimes. The literary conceit is that 14-year-old Susie Salmon is raped and murdered, at which point she enters the perfect consumer heaven - untroubled by God or the unfathomable soul, in Sebold's heaven, we must merely say what we want and it appears. From this vantage, Susie exhibits a mind-boggling lack of curiosity about her sudden new ability to spy on her earthbound loved ones, opting instead to relate the cloyingly transparent activities of her family as they grieve her death and hunt down the man they know killed her, even though they have no evidence to suspect him. From the moment Sebold describes a character's smile as "like stars exploding," I knew this would be a monumental work of emotional [...].
Here is a link to an article from the Guardian in the UK
No comments:
Post a Comment