Great first novel, unexpected twists! Thoroughly mesmerizing!
This book is really difficult to review! The characters are just so unlikeable (seemingly intentional on the author's part).
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And the entire vibe of the book just gets under your skin in a negative way. Yet it somehow manages to addictively draw you in!
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It's truly a bizarre feeling that is challenging to fully verbalize.
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It did clip along quickly, which I liked.
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There's a lot of drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, and self-harm throughout the book.
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I also think the author blatantly used âshock valueâ in her writing, which somewhat cheapened the book for me.
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Overall, I'm not regretful that I read it but I really didn't like it⦠yet I kinda did!
This is definitely an instance where I believe seeing the series first hampered my experience of reading the book. Don't get me wrong, the book is very good. But all I truly ended up doing was replaying the series in my head, visually. This process disconnected me from the story the way I don't like to be when I'm reading.
If you're trying to figure out if you should read the book first, the answer is YES.
Gillian Flynn's first novel, Sharp Objects, may not be quite as twisty as her wildly-popular Gone Girl, but it's definitely full of nasty surprises, perverted motives, and outright evil. Perceptive readers will pick up on part of the secret fairly quickly; others will come, sooner or later, to the same conclusion at which protagonist Camille Preaker reluctantly arrives: You're crazy to think what you're thinking. You're crazy not to think it.
Preaker, a somewhat less than brilliant reporter on a second-class Chicago daily, is sent to her suitably parochial Missouri hometown where the murder of two young girls in less than nine months has townspeople nervous and law enforcement in over their heads. Preaker's editor sees an overlooked story that just might vault his struggling paper into prominence, and thinks the young woman's local connections will help her dig out the details of the investigation. What the editor doesn't understand, and what Preaker is too emotionally fragile to tell him, is that she has been estranged from her family for years, and that being plunged back into the emotional morass of a town where everyone knows â or thinks they know â everyone else's business, is a living nightmare for her.
Flynn has drawn some of the nastiest fictional characters ever to slither around a suspense novel, including a quartet of middle-school girls teetering between sexual promiscuity and mean-girl bullying, a mother figure straight out of hell, and a protagonist with a wheelbarrow full of kinks â sexual and otherwise. It's a horror scenario the reader can barely stand to watch, yet barely manage to put down.
Camille Preaker is a reporter who is sent back to her hometown to cover a story about a missing ten-year-old girl and the unsolved murder of another girl. Camille hasn't been home in years. She is estranged from her mother and barely knows her half-sister Amma. She interviews various people in town as she tries to sort through her feelings about her mother.
I've decided that this author is not for me. It's the second book that I've read by Flynn. I didn't like either of them. The characters in this book are unlikable. I thought both Camille and Amma were ridiculous characters. The subject matter (self-harm, child abuse, dysfunctional family, sexualization of children) was very dark. The mystery wasn't very interesting at all. I thought the identity of the killer was obvious and predictable. I'm glad I got this book from the library and didn't waste money on it. This is the first book I finished in 2024. Thankfully, my reading experience can only get better from here. My rating: 1 Star.
I almost gave up and just went to find the perpetrator. I thought I had some knowledge of the addictive personality but Gillian Flynn took addiction to the next level. I could not identify with the protagonist and the book got quite gruesome and just sick at times.
