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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
A decent read, I guess. I was not caught up in the story, I mostly just wanted to finish the book after investing several hours turning the pages. Joy Fielding is a good writer but this book was a bit of a miss for me.
It was fun, but predictable - I'm terrible at figuring out "whodunit" and I knew this one right away. But I enjoyed it anyway, it was nice escapist low-brow reading. :)
This is not an easy book to review. I couldn’t put it down but the aspects that annoyed me stayed until the end. Fielding does an awesome job at driving the plot forward. Her way of putting a murder mystery into the more usual style of “chick lit” was very engaging. You start out thinking it’s going to be a light read and then some really heavy topics come up. The difficulty is that the characters seemed to act fairly out of character in order to move the plot as necessary and those shifts in behavior weren’t covered off very well. The whole friendship between Charley and Glen, for example, seemed fairly inexplicable with the details we were given. And the details about the abuse and torture of children were somewhat explicit and that added a layer of unpleasantness—a warning would’ve been nice. It makes it harder to recommend the book to a general audience! A great beach read, except when you’re staring into hell.
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
N/A
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
THis book is closer to 3.5 than a 4. Charley writes a bi weekly column for a Florida paper. She is contacted by a death row inmate convicted of torturing and killing 3 small children. She agrees to write the book and is drawn into a socialpath's demented world. Jill plays her, lies to her and only dribbles out the truth to keep her hooked. The problems I had with this book is Charley can be irresponible and does some stupid things. On the other hand the story is written at a pace that keeps you turning the pages trying to figure out if Jill is the killer of these three innocent children or did she have help or was she framed? Fielding manages to handle the subject matter of the children's death well, giving the reader enough info of the killings without details of what happened. This reminds me of cases you read in the news of horrific killings of children. I recommend this book as a fast read that holds your interest and the ending is conclusive without the red herrings or a jolt that makes you go HMMMMMM that is not where the story is going. I can't rate it a 4 because of some of the questionable things Charley does.
When I first started reading Charley's Web, I wasn't sure what I thought. The writing was rather simplistic, but the story was interesting. As the novel progressed, however, I became more and more intrigued and was shocked and on the edge of my seat throughout the last few chapters of the book. This was a great storyline and I was shocked at the end. I'd planned to give it three stars as I read the first half, but with the rewarding ending and the twists to the story, rendering me unable to put the book down, I give it four stars.
Wasn't the greatest book ever, still I have been reading the whole afternoon without realizing so I guess it's gripping even if I kind of assumed how it was going to end and was right...
This should've been a thriller, but until like threequarters of the book it looks more like a chicklit. There's a lot of personal life of Charley Webb, but not much more exciting things happen until the last chapters. The end is very unexpecting, but that's too late. For a chicklit it's worth 4 stars, but since it is a thriller it stays 2 stars.
A little bit of everything leads to a lot of nothing in this book. There's a bit of romance, a bit of mystery, a bit of family drama and a lot of boring, boring boring story. This book reads like someone writing a recipe for a mystery. All the parts are there with little of the flare that makes something special.