Gripping psychological thriller. Highly recommend
This is a story about how the mind works. How emotions are connected to events, and what happens if the event is removed, but the emotions remain. What happens when the nightmare is forgotten, but you are still scared and crying. What happens when your mind has a hole, but your soul still feels the pain.
Jenny Kramer is a 15 year old girl in the wealthy, affluent town of Fairview, Connecticut. At a high school party, Jenny has to much to drink and stumbled in to the woods to escape the ridicule of her peers. Jenny is attacked, savagely and repeatedly raped and branded. There is a cocktail of drugs called The Treatment that will allow Jenny to forget all the brutal details of what happened to her that night. Her mother readily agrees. Jenny still knows what happened to her; she had to be told. She was tore up and the whole town knew. But The Treatment stops her from reliving the nightmare. The problem is that just because the nightmare is erased, the fear, helplessness, and guilt are still there. What happens when these feelings build and build with nothing to put them into perspective? What happens when the nightmare becomes that you can't remember the nightmare?
This story is told from the POV of Jenny's psychiatrist. He is trying to help Jenny recover her memories. He is also separately counseling Jenny's parents, helping them help her and helping then come to terms with their own nightmares. As a narrarator, The Doctor tells the story in bits and pieces, with twist and turn, connections to his own life, and good and bad decisions made by everyone. Eventually everything interconnects to tell the whole story of Jenny's forgotten nightmare.
First, I want to say that this story is not a thriller, if that is what you are thinking. It is a psychological literary fiction. There are twists, and secrets, and devious acts, but it is not a thriller or a suspense. The story being told from the doctor's POV keeps it clinical at first, but then his emotions start to creep in and color the retelling. He is an amazingly honest narrarator, he knows he is bias, but he tells the facts truthfully. He maybe tells them in an order that leaves reader guessing, but he tells everything factually.
Overall, this was a very interesting story. I thoroughly enjoyed the passages of the way the mind works, and how memories are made and stored, and how these memories can be recalled, completed, or corrupted. I also liked that the doctor told us the whole story from his conversations with almost every character in the book.
I didn't care for how unemotional the book left me. I wanted justice, but everything was so sterile that it was hard to empathize with any of the characters. This was also because of the narrarator and probably done on purpose, but I wanted more. I also had a love/hate relationship with how everything ended up being intertwined. I loved that it wove together and it made sense, because why else would he be telling us these things if they were not pertinent to the story. I hated it because it was too easy. Everything was wrapped up with a bow; all the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed. For some reason that bothered me. It was too clean.
I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars, but it was probably more of a 3 1/2. I do recommend this book, just know what type of genre you are reading so you can read it for what it is instead of being disappointed in what you thought it was going to be.
Jenny Kramer is a 15 year old girl in the wealthy, affluent town of Fairview, Connecticut. At a high school party, Jenny has to much to drink and stumbled in to the woods to escape the ridicule of her peers. Jenny is attacked, savagely and repeatedly raped and branded. There is a cocktail of drugs called The Treatment that will allow Jenny to forget all the brutal details of what happened to her that night. Her mother readily agrees. Jenny still knows what happened to her; she had to be told. She was tore up and the whole town knew. But The Treatment stops her from reliving the nightmare. The problem is that just because the nightmare is erased, the fear, helplessness, and guilt are still there. What happens when these feelings build and build with nothing to put them into perspective? What happens when the nightmare becomes that you can't remember the nightmare?
This story is told from the POV of Jenny's psychiatrist. He is trying to help Jenny recover her memories. He is also separately counseling Jenny's parents, helping them help her and helping then come to terms with their own nightmares. As a narrarator, The Doctor tells the story in bits and pieces, with twist and turn, connections to his own life, and good and bad decisions made by everyone. Eventually everything interconnects to tell the whole story of Jenny's forgotten nightmare.
First, I want to say that this story is not a thriller, if that is what you are thinking. It is a psychological literary fiction. There are twists, and secrets, and devious acts, but it is not a thriller or a suspense. The story being told from the doctor's POV keeps it clinical at first, but then his emotions start to creep in and color the retelling. He is an amazingly honest narrarator, he knows he is bias, but he tells the facts truthfully. He maybe tells them in an order that leaves reader guessing, but he tells everything factually.
Overall, this was a very interesting story. I thoroughly enjoyed the passages of the way the mind works, and how memories are made and stored, and how these memories can be recalled, completed, or corrupted. I also liked that the doctor told us the whole story from his conversations with almost every character in the book.
I didn't care for how unemotional the book left me. I wanted justice, but everything was so sterile that it was hard to empathize with any of the characters. This was also because of the narrarator and probably done on purpose, but I wanted more. I also had a love/hate relationship with how everything ended up being intertwined. I loved that it wove together and it made sense, because why else would he be telling us these things if they were not pertinent to the story. I hated it because it was too easy. Everything was wrapped up with a bow; all the i's were dotted and the t's were crossed. For some reason that bothered me. It was too clean.
I gave this book 3 out of 5 stars, but it was probably more of a 3 1/2. I do recommend this book, just know what type of genre you are reading so you can read it for what it is instead of being disappointed in what you thought it was going to be.
