{"id":458,"date":"2014-09-26T17:42:55","date_gmt":"2014-09-26T17:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=458"},"modified":"2020-01-18T08:35:38","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T13:35:38","slug":"not-so-crazy-about-gone-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/not-so-crazy-about-gone-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Not So Crazy About Gone Girl?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A mystery reading friend recently asked me what I thought about Kathy Reichs’ D\u00e9ja Dead<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Why bring up a book that came out sixteen years ago? Because a line from my Detroit Free Press<\/em> review was in the paperback with other review quotes: “As good as Patricia Cornwell at her best.”<\/p>\n

So my friend wanted to know what I thought, since it was being read by her book group. I told her I couldn’t remember. I reviewed hundreds of books for the Detroit Free Press<\/em> back when I was their crime fiction columnist. Reviewed hundreds, and started and abandoned hundreds more searching for ones I thought my readers would enjoy.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t recall anything specific about Reichs’ thriller, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. It just meant that better books had eclipsed it in my memory. And that might have been a question of timing. Sometimes a book that people told me was great seemed dim because the book I’d reviewed just before it was amazing. Sometimes a book might have struck me as better than it actually was because I’d read a number of turkeys in a row.<\/p>\n

Whatever I felt, I tried not to be steamrolled by the media juggernaut, because now and then I’d be hit with massive waves of PR telling me that this<\/em> book was going to rock my world<\/em>. If it didn’t, I’d skip a review, unless I felt I wanted to issue a kind of consumer warning, a service to my readers: People say this book is brilliant, but don’t feel there’s something wrong with you if you don’t agree.<\/p>\n

I found that recently with Gillian Flynn’s best-selling Gone Girl<\/em>, whose movie version was just released. The whole galaxy seems to be in love with this thriller. Check out the Amazon page–you’d think nobody had ever written a thriller as amazing as this book, that Gillian Flynn, in other words, was as good as it gets. Is there a newspaper or magazine in the country that isn’t in love with her book?<\/p>\n

Friends whose taste I respect urged me to read it, and I tried more than once because I hadn’t read a good thriller in a while and was looking for something gripping. Each time, though, I didn’t get very far. Though I made some progress, the thought of spending any time at all in the company of a voice that obnoxious was painful to me. Overall, I found the prose uninviting.<\/p>\n

As for the huge twist people raved about? Well, when they told me the set-up, I guessed at how the twist would unravel and I checked Wikipedia. I was right. That’s not because I was especially clever, but because other writers and screenwriters had done similar things before Flynn and it was fairly obvious.<\/p>\n

I’m on a mystery readers’ and writers’ discussion list where almost everyone thinks this book is dazzling, and when I disagreed, I got grateful comments off-list. Why is it that when the media raves about a book and Goodreads and Amazon seem to rubber stamp that opinion, people are often embarrassed to dissent?<\/p>\n

Well, if it helps any of you out there who weren’t wild about Gone Girl<\/em>, take a closer look at its Amazon page. The last time I checked, for the 14,000+ readers there who gave it four or five stars, 7,000 gave it only one to three stars. You are not alone. Maybe it’s time to think about a support group….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A mystery reading friend recently asked me what I thought about Kathy Reichs’ D\u00e9ja Dead. Why bring up a book that came out sixteen years ago? Because a line from my Detroit Free Press review was in the paperback with other review quotes: “As good as Patricia Cornwell at her best.” So my friend wanted … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,4,104,101,102,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amazon","category-authors","category-detroit-free-press","category-gillian-flynn","category-goodreads","category-thrillers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=458"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5439,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/458\/revisions\/5439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}