Friday 4th December 2009
by Caroline
I picked this book up at Goodwill. My friend Lindsey asked if I’d read it before. When I said no, she laughed and said, “Have fun with that.”
To be succinct: This is the worst book I’ve ever read.
It’s terribly written, badly plotted, bizarre, nonsensical, and not half as compelling as I imagined from its scandalous reputation. The completist in me was excited to spent 89 cents and add it to my repertoire, and really, I wish I hadn’t — instead of a satisfying guilty pleasure, this book is all boredom and clunky phrasing. One of the major reasons is the way Andrews uses the word “for” as a transition: Characters mill around and say things like, “I couldn’t believe it, for Momma had never spoke this way before.”
The advice I give everyone who ever asks me for writing or editing help is this: You don’t need to be a good writer, let alone a great one; you need to write so that your words don’t distract from your point. Andrews tries to curb the awful writing in her book with the frame that narrator Cathy has written it, that it is a “true story,” and that she hopes some publisher will take pity and print it. The only reason I can fathom this book reaching publication is the subject matter, and Andrews hits these huge topics — incest, rape, child abuse, destructive greed — with a wanton lack of respect.
Cannonball logo font: Sketch Rockwell. For more on the Cannonball Read, see Pajiba.
one response
[...] Nearly two years ago I devoured John Steinbeck’s late-in-career travel memoir Travels with Charley and, later that year, took a road trip across America’s northeastern quadrant. Steinbeck’s prose walks a line between the all-out terseness of Hemingway and the more ornamental nature of other writers, and because of that he embodies my favorite writing rule: Don’t let your writing distract from your point. (Maybe you remember this from when I read Flowers in the Attic?) [...]