Author: Annabel Pitcher
Publisher: Little Brown
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Here's a part of the completely asinine blurb for this novel:
Secrets, romance, murder and lies: Zoe shares a terrible secret in a letter to a stranger on death row in this second novel from the author of the bestselling debut, My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece.
Fifteen-year-old Zoe has a secret-a dark and terrible secret that she can't confess to anyone she knows. But then one day she hears of a criminal, Stuart Harris, locked up on death row in Texas. Like Zoe, Stuart is no stranger to secrets. Or lies. Or murder.
This blurb is entirely lies! Yeah, I get that that's what blurbs do for a profession, to get you to buy the book, but usually they have some sort of relationship to reality, no matter how tenuous. This one doesn't - not at all! Not even a little bit.
I listened to the audio book version of this novel, and the only thing which got me through the entire book was the charming accent and intonation of the reader, Julie Maisey, which I wanted to listen to even when I didn't want to hear what was written! I'd love to hear her read something else, or see her in a show or movie, but as it was, the boring content of this novel had made me want to ditch it part way through the first disk. I didn't, because I had chance to listen to the second disk on the return drive, and that was more interesting. Had it been a shorter trip, this book would have been DNF'd, but even as it was, I still can't rate it a worthy read.
The asinine premise here is that Zoe, the main character who narrates this via a series of letters she's writing, has murdered someone, and is writing to Stuart Harris, who is on death row in Texas, having been deemed guilty of stabbing his girlfriend to death. We learn nothing about him, and hear none of his replies, if there ever were any, so he's a complete non-entity, and this really exposed this form of novel writing for the pretentious pile of garbage that it is.
It also, of course, begs the huge question as to why the author chose this format in the first place. First person PoV rarely works well. I typically put a book back on the shelf when I learn it's in this format even if the book had, to that point, sounded interesting, but in the case of audio books and ebooks, you can't stand there in the library or the bookstore and flip a few pages to see if you'd like it. Plus, you can't tell a story by writing letters, not even if you're the laziest SoB on the planet. IT. DOESN'T. WORK. The letters are completely unnatural and sound as fake as hell.
The whole business of a fifteen-year-old girl writing to a death row inmate who had stabbed his girlfriend struck me as ridiculous at best, and outright sick at worse, especially when she's signing off the letter with a kiss. Seriously? But then this novel is an exercise in the abuse of women without consequences, so Harris was the out-lier here. Maybe that's why we learn nothing of this guy, and why we don't hear of any response from him. Unless I missed something (I skipped many tracks, so it's possible), we don't even know if Zoe is actually mailing the letters in the first place.
It's so glaringly obvious from the start that Zoe hasn't murdered anyone, so the story's "big reveal" at the end isn't one at all. It's evidently just a gimmick, like the letter-writing, of which the author ought to be ashamed. If Zoe had literally murdered someone, one presumes there would be consequences beyond what we're given here, but there are none. She's not writing her letters from in prison, but from the garage, or garden shed or something. This story would have been far better had she been behind bars and we later learned that the bars were on the window in her room in a psychiatric institute where Zoe was an inmate.
This entire story lacks oomph, is plodding, is entirely unrealistic, and reeks of Le Stupide. Zoe has to be one of the most tedious and boring narrators ever invented, constantly going off on tangents and rarely focusing on the point. No one writes letters like that, not even in real life. It was really frustrating. She's consistently portrayed as a spineless puppet who vacillates between two brothers, which in the end precipitates the unfortunate showdown at the end.
Why she's even remotely interested in the younger of the two, who is not only a moron, but who has sexually abused her by taking a photograph of her exposed breasts without her consent (or at best with her drunken consent, which is the same thing), is a mystery. He circulated the picture to his high-school friends. This doesn't stop Zoe from rewarding his unacceptable behavior by dating him, nor does it prevent her from sexually frustrating him by sending him mixed signals, which also contributes to the finale. Nor does it prevent her from leading-on his older brother. Nor does she deem it necessary to let either brother know that she's playing them both.
Zoe's family life was actually portrayed realistically, and would have made a decent story had it not been larded with the farcical letter writing, and the ludicrous love triangle. Had those been omitted, and just her family story told, it would have made for something potentially worthy. Her youngest sister Dot is hearing-impaired, so that was a plus. We rarely see people with physical or mental handicaps included in stories unless their condition plays a role in the story. It's like they don't exist in the fictional world, but that inclusion, and the family dynamic were not enough to offset the dumb-assery revolving around Zoe, who was teeth-grindingly annoying, so I can not only not recommend this novel, I actively dis-recommend it.
