alexbuch reviewed Heatwave by Victor Jestin
Review of 'Heatwave' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
2.5 stars rounded up
English language
Published April 13, 2022 by Simon & Schuster, Limited.
2 stars
(2 reviews)
Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing.
Leonard is an outsider, a seventeen-year-old uncomfortable in his own skin who is forced to endure a family camping holiday in the South of France. Tired of awkwardly creeping out of beach parties after only a couple of beers, he chooses to spend the final Friday night of the trip in bed. However, when he cannot sleep due to the sound of wild carousing outside his tent, he gets up and goes for a walk.
As he wanders among the dunes, he sees Oscar, one of the cooler kids, drunk in a playground, hanging by his neck from the ropes of a swing. Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. Unable to think straight, he buries Oscar in the sand and returns to the campsite …
Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing.
Leonard is an outsider, a seventeen-year-old uncomfortable in his own skin who is forced to endure a family camping holiday in the South of France. Tired of awkwardly creeping out of beach parties after only a couple of beers, he chooses to spend the final Friday night of the trip in bed. However, when he cannot sleep due to the sound of wild carousing outside his tent, he gets up and goes for a walk.
As he wanders among the dunes, he sees Oscar, one of the cooler kids, drunk in a playground, hanging by his neck from the ropes of a swing. Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. Unable to think straight, he buries Oscar in the sand and returns to the campsite where, oppressed by the ferocious heat and the weight of what he did and did not do, he will try to spend the remaining hours of the holiday as if nothing had happened.
Told over the space of a long weekend, this intense and brilliant novel is the story of an adolescent struggling to fit in. Heatwave is a gripping psychological thriller that poses the existential question:
Is doing nothing sometimes the very worst thing you can do?
Translated by Sam Taylor, translator of Lullaby by Leila Slimani, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joel Dicker and HHhH by Laurent Binet.
Dee reviewed Heatwave by Victor Jestin
Review of 'Heatwave' on 'Goodreads'
1 star
A quick but rather dull read. Really nothing more than a teenager witnessing a suicide which he then foolishly decides to cover up by burying the body. He ends up being infatuated with a girl he barely knows and practically forgets about the suicide. The ending bore no real shock, he just confesses as the killer ?
I would also like to add that the Leonard, the main character, is portrayed as incredibly incompetent. It's not expected of a teenager to be Holmes but any 17 year old would know better than to decide to take a dead person's phone and carry it around. I will not even bother with the idea of a presumably skinny and scrawny 17 year old managing to drag a whole body around and bury it unnoticed. The writing in this book just feels very inauthentic and flat.
1/5
Much more could have been done …
A quick but rather dull read. Really nothing more than a teenager witnessing a suicide which he then foolishly decides to cover up by burying the body. He ends up being infatuated with a girl he barely knows and practically forgets about the suicide. The ending bore no real shock, he just confesses as the killer ?
I would also like to add that the Leonard, the main character, is portrayed as incredibly incompetent. It's not expected of a teenager to be Holmes but any 17 year old would know better than to decide to take a dead person's phone and carry it around. I will not even bother with the idea of a presumably skinny and scrawny 17 year old managing to drag a whole body around and bury it unnoticed. The writing in this book just feels very inauthentic and flat.
1/5
Much more could have been done with idea had it not been restricted and diluted into a 100 page piece with no real weight to its words.