Have you seen Mare of Eastown?
This is a lot like that.
But without coffee from Wawa. And without Jean Smart. Without amazing accents and bearded Roy-from-the-Office.
Oh, and without good writing or realistic characters.
If you’ve seen Mare, no need to read this.
Really, no need to read this at all.
I had the mystery solved before the first chapter had ended and tortured myself to finish to prove I was right.
Chloe Davis is an amazingly brilliant and wonderful young psychologist living in Baton Rouge. We know she is amazingly brilliant because she tells us. In the therapy sessions that are described she seems disinterested and distracted, borderline rude, but we are told she’s great at her job, so she must be.
Chloe is the daughter of one of the world’s most nefarious serial killers. 20 years ago, her father kidnapped and murdered 6 young girls in their small Louisiana bayou town. We know he was nefarious because she tells us.
And now, on the 20th anniversary of those disappearances, girls are going missing in Baton Rouge. It must be a copy-cat killer, she tells us.
And fireflies are clearly an important part of the story, because she tells us that they are.
Chloe can’t go to the police with the evidence she is gathering in her mind, because the police think she is crazy. Why? Because she tells us that they do.
Tell tell tell tell tell.
This book is full of TELLING not SHOWING. And it made me crazy.
Don’t get me wrong, the book is filled to the brim with adjectives and adverbs, and some editor somewhere must have thought that those descriptive words were good enough for explaining and showing. But they aren’t. They are just filler.
Characters are introduced simply to let you know that bad things will happen to them later in the book. Chloe doesn’t seem to have a single friend in her life, even though she tells us that she does. There is a huge party at the beginning of the story FILLED WITH FRIENDS who are literally never mentioned again, unless something terrible happens to them later.
And another thing.
Told in the first person (which is fine), the verb tenses kept switching back and forth. “I walk to the store” vs. “I’m walking to the store” and it really got under my skin. How was this a book of the month club selection?
I really hated this book. Please don’t bother.
I Lost on Jeopardy 