logantmartin 's review for:

Shame by Annie Ernaux

3.5

emotional reflective fast-paced

---

I felt like Ernaux kind of lost the plot with this one. A book called Shame with a disgustingly green cover advertises a very specific tone that I was really excited for. The famous opening line of the book had me absolutely foaming at the mouth to get into it. But after the first section of the book, where Ernaux details her father's attempt to kill her mother, the tone simply falls over, becoming yet another rehashing of Ernaux's childhood, which she has covered much more intimately in her previous work. She vaguely describes the shame she feels about her upbringing and the homicide attempt of That Summer, but the shame is incidental to the story, not its focus.