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A review by domino911
Blood Wedding by Pierre Lemaitre
5.0
In the same territory as Gone Girl, Before I Sleep, Girl on the Train, Pierre Lemaitre's Blood Wedding is nastier and more visceral than any of these.
Sophie Duguet, a thirty-ish woman who believes she is descending into madness, currently employed as a nanny, wakes to find her 7 year old ward strangled in his bed, with no memory of having committed the murder. It's a scene that could become cliché, having appeared in countless novels and film noirs Lemaitre's prose, in describing Sophie's immediate reaction. And it is fitting that the tension and claustrophobia that Lemaitre creates in Blood Wedding more closely resembles the latter, the best of the black and white crime movies whose genesis lay in French cinema.
Although suffering from intermittent memory blackouts and panicked, Sophie is resourceful and desperate, and we follow her escape from the law, as bodies continue to pile up. Sophie's recent history is one of failure and personal tragedy. She believes her mental issues are to blame for the murders. And then....
Blood Wedding is a dark psychological thriller where little is as it first seems. Lemaitre builds the tension, the feeling of breathlessness, to almost unbearable levels and Frank Wynne, the translator, doesn't attempt to make his translation too British or American, retaining the essential Frenchness of the narrative.
I reviewed a pre-publication ARC of Blood Wedding courtesy of Netgalley and Quercus Books.
Sophie Duguet, a thirty-ish woman who believes she is descending into madness, currently employed as a nanny, wakes to find her 7 year old ward strangled in his bed, with no memory of having committed the murder. It's a scene that could become cliché, having appeared in countless novels and film noirs Lemaitre's prose, in describing Sophie's immediate reaction. And it is fitting that the tension and claustrophobia that Lemaitre creates in Blood Wedding more closely resembles the latter, the best of the black and white crime movies whose genesis lay in French cinema.
Although suffering from intermittent memory blackouts and panicked, Sophie is resourceful and desperate, and we follow her escape from the law, as bodies continue to pile up. Sophie's recent history is one of failure and personal tragedy. She believes her mental issues are to blame for the murders. And then....
Blood Wedding is a dark psychological thriller where little is as it first seems. Lemaitre builds the tension, the feeling of breathlessness, to almost unbearable levels and Frank Wynne, the translator, doesn't attempt to make his translation too British or American, retaining the essential Frenchness of the narrative.
I reviewed a pre-publication ARC of Blood Wedding courtesy of Netgalley and Quercus Books.