Title:
All the Truth That's in Me
Author:
Julie Berry
Publisher:
Penguin Audio
Rating:
WARTY!
Read on average by Kathleen McInerney
This is quite possible the worst novel that I've ever heard. It's most certainly one of the most mind-numbingly boring, pointless, tedious, vague and vacuous drivel-laden stories that it's ever been my misfortune to encounter.
The story takes place in Puritan times (which explains a lot, but nowhere near enough) four years after Judith disappeared with her best friend. The bad news is that Judith has now returned, sans tongue but with her obsessive-compulsive disorder in order. Now she's a stalker, spying on this guy over whom she constantly obsesses, like a paranoid queen cat with only one kitten.
Juditz is so shallow, weak, boring, and vacuous that her every and only thought is about him and only him, her not-so-beau aka Lukewarm. Worse than that, it's addressed to him, as though she's yelling, "Luke at me! I have something unimportant to say!" It's a story he quite obviously already knows for the most part. How flatulent is that? Can you imagine how tedious it would be to have to sit next to a love-struck thirteen-year-old on the subway and all she can do is bend your tired ear with her plans to stalk this guy with whom she's become irremediably obsessed? Yeah, like that. Does Julie Berry not know how much the diametric opposite of romantic it is to have one person stalk another? I guess not.
First person PoV is a tired trope that needs to die a long-deserved and way-the-hell overdue death, and with precious few exceptions. Some writers can carry it, but Berry cannot, unless by 'carry it' you mean hike it onto your shoulder and bounce it until its back is comprehensively broken. She makes a bad story worse by writing in this way, so it;s hardly a surprise that it was nominated for a butt-load of pretentious 'literature' medals.
The book's blurb (and we all know how much they love to lie) says, "This startlingly original novel will shock and disturb you". Well yeah, it did, in how bad it is. The blurb says, "it will fill you with Judith’s passion and longing". Well no, it turned me right off so quickly that I was skipping track after track on disk one (which makes it potentially dangerous if you're listening to it in the car!), trying to find something to which you can listen whilst still keeping your breakfast down.
Stalking doesn't fill me with passion. Dysfunctional doesn't endear me. The blurb says, "its mysteries will keep you feverishly turning the pages until the very last". Well I was feverishly 'turning pages" but only because each one in turn was so brain-deadeningly tedious that I couldn't stand to listen to it! WARTY!
