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jordandvdsn7 's review for:
Rust & Stardust
by T. Greenwood
This is another book that I won't rate due to its subject matter.
It probably goes without saying that this book is highly, HIGHLY disturbing and upsetting. In fact, it could contend with Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun for the title of Most Disturbing Book I Have Ever Read. While I usually have a voracious appetite for books that are sad and dark and creepy, I've learned from reading this that even I have a threshold for how much despair and sadness I can take from a book.
That's a compliment to this book by the way.
The particular genius of this book is in the economy of its words and storytelling. It never goes the cheap route of describing what happens to Sally at the hands of her captor; instead it's all implications and euphemisms and "fade to black"-type narration, which both mercifully shelters the reader and unmercifully forces their imagination to fill in the horrific details.
Of course, what it DOES say deserves accolades too. The prose is crisp and at times lovely, which only makes the darkness of this book even more distressing. There are several sentences in here that are just lovely, so much so that if they weren't from this book I'd want to copy them and have them made into a lovely art print for my wall (as it is, it's be awkward to have this book quoted anywhere in my house). And of course, there are several other sentences that are darkly, bleakly beautiful - they hurt to read, and yet you want to read them over and over.
I have to give this author a lot of respect. True crime novels are hard, even harder when writing one involves tackling subject matter like this, but she handled it splendidly. A little too splendidly for my comfort maybe, but splendidly all the same.
It probably goes without saying that this book is highly, HIGHLY disturbing and upsetting. In fact, it could contend with Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun for the title of Most Disturbing Book I Have Ever Read. While I usually have a voracious appetite for books that are sad and dark and creepy, I've learned from reading this that even I have a threshold for how much despair and sadness I can take from a book.
That's a compliment to this book by the way.
The particular genius of this book is in the economy of its words and storytelling. It never goes the cheap route of describing what happens to Sally at the hands of her captor; instead it's all implications and euphemisms and "fade to black"-type narration, which both mercifully shelters the reader and unmercifully forces their imagination to fill in the horrific details.
Of course, what it DOES say deserves accolades too. The prose is crisp and at times lovely, which only makes the darkness of this book even more distressing. There are several sentences in here that are just lovely, so much so that if they weren't from this book I'd want to copy them and have them made into a lovely art print for my wall (as it is, it's be awkward to have this book quoted anywhere in my house). And of course, there are several other sentences that are darkly, bleakly beautiful - they hurt to read, and yet you want to read them over and over.
I have to give this author a lot of respect. True crime novels are hard, even harder when writing one involves tackling subject matter like this, but she handled it splendidly. A little too splendidly for my comfort maybe, but splendidly all the same.