bibliolydia 's review for:

The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond

1.0

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AWFUL, AWFUL, AWFUL! I usually advise my students to stay away from all caps and exclamation points, but there is not other way for me to scream about the catastrophe that is this novel. For starters it is about 300 pages too long. And what's with the page and a half chapters? If I'm going to read 81 chapters the book better be 800 pages long. However, this novel sure felt like it was 800 pages long. The protagonist was whiny and irritating. She wants to find her fiance's daughter, but her constant paranoia about her fiance dumping her just intensifies her selfishness. I'm glad he didn't take her back. She lost his kid for crying out loud! How could he ever trust her again? I hate her. I also hate that the only thing dragging me to the end of the story was to find out what did happen to the little girl. I had to go about 350 pages into the novel to find that out. I was two seconds from saying "screw it, I do care what happened to the kid." The ending was so anticlimactic. Not that I want to read about the horrible things people might do to little girls, but the author barely alludes to what might have been done to this little girl. I think the worst of it was that she was locked in a house with only a box of macaroni and cheese. Really? That's it? She's been missing for a year and that's the worst that happened to her? 300+ pages of the story labor on and on about the protagonist's pathetic life, including an inappropriate relationship when she was 16 with a 27 year old, and stupid tidbits about how memory works. Seriously, forcing someone to read this book is a new form of torture.