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greatlibraryofalexandra 's review for:
Grist Mill Road
by Christopher J. Yates
Pretty run of the (grist) mill “there’s more to the story than you think” story - but ultimately I think the problem with this book is that the core crime is just so .... outlandishly stupid.
Matthew, as a character, is written extremely well. As a whole I enjoyed Yates’ writing, aside from a few aesthetic/artistic choices. The story had elements of Stephen King’s “It” and of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” but honestly - this book never packed the punch of those novels. The “Hannah” (Briony, if you’ve read “Atonement”) character was unsympathetic in every way as both a child and as an adult, and yet the crime Matthew undertook against her was just - bizarre, brutal, and kind of nonsensical when the “truth” of the story was finally described.
McCluskey was a faceless nothing character who existed for no other reason than to constantly utter the infuriating nickname “Aitch” for Hannah, which was one of the two nearly unbearable writing choices Yates’ made - just use the letter “H,” for Christ’s sake! Making it phonetic is so cringeworthy, considering it takes twice as long to parse out that “Aitch” is actually just someone calling Hannah “H.”
The second awful artistic choice was the lack of quotation marks around any dialogue. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - this is an utterly infuriating thing authors do. It’s pretentious in a cringeworthy way and contributes to a foggy confusion that pervades the whole story. It isn’t edgy; it’s fake intellectual, and it keeps any book from achieving a truly good rating if I’m the one reading it.
But I didn’t think this book was a waste, necessarily. Written well, and senselessly tragic, with a rather paltry core conflict, I’d recommend it to people who enjoy reading good writing in this thematic field in one sitting.
Matthew, as a character, is written extremely well. As a whole I enjoyed Yates’ writing, aside from a few aesthetic/artistic choices. The story had elements of Stephen King’s “It” and of Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” but honestly - this book never packed the punch of those novels. The “Hannah” (Briony, if you’ve read “Atonement”) character was unsympathetic in every way as both a child and as an adult, and yet the crime Matthew undertook against her was just - bizarre, brutal, and kind of nonsensical when the “truth” of the story was finally described.
McCluskey was a faceless nothing character who existed for no other reason than to constantly utter the infuriating nickname “Aitch” for Hannah, which was one of the two nearly unbearable writing choices Yates’ made - just use the letter “H,” for Christ’s sake! Making it phonetic is so cringeworthy, considering it takes twice as long to parse out that “Aitch” is actually just someone calling Hannah “H.”
The second awful artistic choice was the lack of quotation marks around any dialogue. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - this is an utterly infuriating thing authors do. It’s pretentious in a cringeworthy way and contributes to a foggy confusion that pervades the whole story. It isn’t edgy; it’s fake intellectual, and it keeps any book from achieving a truly good rating if I’m the one reading it.
But I didn’t think this book was a waste, necessarily. Written well, and senselessly tragic, with a rather paltry core conflict, I’d recommend it to people who enjoy reading good writing in this thematic field in one sitting.