It's been a while since I read a Turow book but he's always been one of my favorite authors, partly because he's not afraid to stretch in terms of writing different types of protagonists. I think there has been mixed success on that front, but I admire the willingness to take chances, and I like the character he created here, who's probably as unlike the author (I assume) as you can get, and the diversity of the surrounding characters. This story doesn't have the murkiness and twistiness of some of his other work, but it moves along.
I have mixed feelings about this novel. The narrator, Pinky, is an intriguing character who sees herself as being socially odd but comfortable with herself and her choices, including enjoying casual sex but avoiding commitment. Her puzzling neighbor is also intriguing though some of the elements didn't add up for me (such as his being Hmong - it's dropped in but doesn't seem to have shaped his character at all. His family relationships are equally contradictory: his wife is completely mad and out of control, but then seems not to be when he goes back to her, but he says she is . . . it was hard to put it together. returnreturnThe main plot concerns a personable and interesting police chief who does things so stupid it seemed another example to me of a character that is in part vividly drawn but also inconsistent. Would a smart and ambitious …
I have mixed feelings about this novel. The narrator, Pinky, is an intriguing character who sees herself as being socially odd but comfortable with herself and her choices, including enjoying casual sex but avoiding commitment. Her puzzling neighbor is also intriguing though some of the elements didn't add up for me (such as his being Hmong - it's dropped in but doesn't seem to have shaped his character at all. His family relationships are equally contradictory: his wife is completely mad and out of control, but then seems not to be when he goes back to her, but he says she is . . . it was hard to put it together. returnreturnThe main plot concerns a personable and interesting police chief who does things so stupid it seemed another example to me of a character that is in part vividly drawn but also inconsistent. Would a smart and ambitious woman endanger herself the way she did? Well, make a case for it, but I was not convinced. returnreturnThe pacing was fine up to the final scenes, which to me dragged around the technical aspects of getting the goods on a billionaire bad guy. (Another character inconsistency for me: he sure didn't act like a billionaire, but like a local hood who had a powerful but totally small-town empire.) Then the dramatic confrontation is filtered through our narrator, who watches it from afar, which diluted the suspense for me. At any rate, I didn't find the last few chapters especially effective. It may have been reader error. returnreturnMy previous experience reading this author set my expectations high, so I may be being unduly harsh, but I was disappointed.
