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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
dark
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
dark
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I’m honestly baffled by the good reviews this book has.
The premise had promise but this author loved to make thinly veiled racist remarks that turned to flat out using the n word. Not only that, the one main character later says, "excuse me for being r*tarded" which again is a slur. The author also repeatedly uses queer as a verb (I've never heard it used as such & I read a lot!) which could have easily been replaced by numerous similes.
There's also a fair amount of spelling errors in the ebook but it's the casual use of slurs that I really disliked & that took me out of the story. There's sections too which were unnecessary like listing everyone's names at the football game; no reason to say there's a lot of John's & then spend a few sentences listing all their full names when it had NOTHING to do with the plot. The game itself was very in depth & didn't need to be either. The story itself got very convoluted at the end & there's a lead given by a character about "Greenland" which is said in a way like it's important, yet it's NEVER mentioned again. It's like the author forgot about it. All in all I can't recommend this book & I honestly finished it only because I wanted to see if that Greenland lead was ever discussed & it wasn't. Entirely too much focus on using slurs & disparaging homosexuals, black people, & a whole section on Vietnamese people that had absolutely nothing to do with the story. So much should have been edited out & the length could have been trimmed quite a lot by removing the extraneous sections. Don't waste your time or you money.
The premise had promise but this author loved to make thinly veiled racist remarks that turned to flat out using the n word. Not only that, the one main character later says, "excuse me for being r*tarded" which again is a slur. The author also repeatedly uses queer as a verb (I've never heard it used as such & I read a lot!) which could have easily been replaced by numerous similes.
There's also a fair amount of spelling errors in the ebook but it's the casual use of slurs that I really disliked & that took me out of the story. There's sections too which were unnecessary like listing everyone's names at the football game; no reason to say there's a lot of John's & then spend a few sentences listing all their full names when it had NOTHING to do with the plot. The game itself was very in depth & didn't need to be either. The story itself got very convoluted at the end & there's a lead given by a character about "Greenland" which is said in a way like it's important, yet it's NEVER mentioned again. It's like the author forgot about it. All in all I can't recommend this book & I honestly finished it only because I wanted to see if that Greenland lead was ever discussed & it wasn't. Entirely too much focus on using slurs & disparaging homosexuals, black people, & a whole section on Vietnamese people that had absolutely nothing to do with the story. So much should have been edited out & the length could have been trimmed quite a lot by removing the extraneous sections. Don't waste your time or you money.
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Don’t judge a book by its movie, right? I absolutely LOVED the film version of Gone Baby Gone, so much so that I went right out and grabbed Moonlight Mile, the sequel book, which I also loved. I noticed a couple of discrepancies between the first movie and the second book, the most notable being that in the film version of GBG, Bea and Lionel were a childless couple. A son was mentioned in Moonlight Mile.
Before I get too far off-track, Gone Baby Gone is the story of Amanda McCready, a four-year-old girl who’s gone missing from her mother, Helene’s, ‘unlocked’ apartment. Helene is an unfit parent, no two ways about that, and her brother, Lionel, and his wife, Beatrice (Bea), step in where they can to fill the void left by her absentee parenting. When Amanda goes missing, Bea hires Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genarro, two private detectives, to augment the police investigation, which immediately (and conveniently) turns up no leads. Patrick and Angie are reluctant to take the case, having found too many dead kids and unwilling to face the personal toll it takes on them, again. Something about Bea changes their minds. The deeper they look into Helene, the more shady characters emerge from her drug muling past as probably suspects in Amanda’s kidnapping.
I’m going to stop there to avoid spoilers, but I’m going to go back to the film/book comparison because while so often Hollywood destroys a story with the cutting of scenes to pare down run time, in GBG’s case, the film did some things really right. The book features an extended cast of characters, including Bea’s son, which detracts from the believability that she’d go so far to ‘save Amanda’. There’s a line in the film where Helene criticizes Bea for ‘God making her barren’ (Helene is an ignorant, hateful character), and that simple fact made me believe that Bea would mortgage everything down to her socks to save this child who is, by proxy, ‘hers’.
Several of the characters names were changes, as were their descriptions, the most notable being Cheese “Olamon” who was an overweight white inmate in the book, and was a Haitian drug lord in the movie. Remy Broussard is Remy Bressant in the movie, and his partner Poole, was much less present. A drug transaction between Bubba and the Trents (in the movie) was a gun transaction in the book, but the end result of that grisly scene is the same. These minor changes were no big deal, but there’s a football scene in the book that I, not being a sports fan, didn’t enjoy, and it dragged on across a couple of chapters. The book seemed to take the long way around to the things the movie managed to accomplish in a line or two of succinct dialogue.
All in all, the story is incredible, but if you’ve seen the movie and enjoyed it, you, like me, might find the book a bit less powerful. The book deals a lot in low-level crime and more so in the police angle than in the Kenzie and Genarro’s dynamic. Angie is particularly unlikeable in the book, by comparison. Her squeaky clean movie image was tainted by her chain smoking, tough girl persona in the book. Helene’s character was lost in the book, which seemed less about Amanda and more about the Boston PD. I give the book four stars because I’m a Lehane fan and I’m not sure I can rate the book objectively since the translation to film was my biggest hang-up. I know, in my heart, that’s wrong. But I liked Moonlight Mile better.
Before I get too far off-track, Gone Baby Gone is the story of Amanda McCready, a four-year-old girl who’s gone missing from her mother, Helene’s, ‘unlocked’ apartment. Helene is an unfit parent, no two ways about that, and her brother, Lionel, and his wife, Beatrice (Bea), step in where they can to fill the void left by her absentee parenting. When Amanda goes missing, Bea hires Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genarro, two private detectives, to augment the police investigation, which immediately (and conveniently) turns up no leads. Patrick and Angie are reluctant to take the case, having found too many dead kids and unwilling to face the personal toll it takes on them, again. Something about Bea changes their minds. The deeper they look into Helene, the more shady characters emerge from her drug muling past as probably suspects in Amanda’s kidnapping.
I’m going to stop there to avoid spoilers, but I’m going to go back to the film/book comparison because while so often Hollywood destroys a story with the cutting of scenes to pare down run time, in GBG’s case, the film did some things really right. The book features an extended cast of characters, including Bea’s son, which detracts from the believability that she’d go so far to ‘save Amanda’. There’s a line in the film where Helene criticizes Bea for ‘God making her barren’ (Helene is an ignorant, hateful character), and that simple fact made me believe that Bea would mortgage everything down to her socks to save this child who is, by proxy, ‘hers’.
Several of the characters names were changes, as were their descriptions, the most notable being Cheese “Olamon” who was an overweight white inmate in the book, and was a Haitian drug lord in the movie. Remy Broussard is Remy Bressant in the movie, and his partner Poole, was much less present. A drug transaction between Bubba and the Trents (in the movie) was a gun transaction in the book, but the end result of that grisly scene is the same. These minor changes were no big deal, but there’s a football scene in the book that I, not being a sports fan, didn’t enjoy, and it dragged on across a couple of chapters. The book seemed to take the long way around to the things the movie managed to accomplish in a line or two of succinct dialogue.
All in all, the story is incredible, but if you’ve seen the movie and enjoyed it, you, like me, might find the book a bit less powerful. The book deals a lot in low-level crime and more so in the police angle than in the Kenzie and Genarro’s dynamic. Angie is particularly unlikeable in the book, by comparison. Her squeaky clean movie image was tainted by her chain smoking, tough girl persona in the book. Helene’s character was lost in the book, which seemed less about Amanda and more about the Boston PD. I give the book four stars because I’m a Lehane fan and I’m not sure I can rate the book objectively since the translation to film was my biggest hang-up. I know, in my heart, that’s wrong. But I liked Moonlight Mile better.
adventurous
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
challenging
dark
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Sick. I really enjoyed Shutter Island and thought I'd like more by the same author but this mystery was not fun to read.