**spoiler alert** I am annoyed. I have been reading Karin Slaughter books for almost 20 years now and loved the majority of them. They've been going d**spoiler alert** I am annoyed. I have been reading Karin Slaughter books for almost 20 years now and loved the majority of them. They've been going downhill for a while (Silent Witness was lazy, False Witness seemed like it relied on shock value and Girl, Forgotten was meh) but this one, this one! The giant, glaring plot hole that propels this one forward had me wanting to rip my hair out.
A lot of emphasis is put on the fact that Sara had gone to court for her 15 year old rape and assault, the guy was charged and served his sentence. But she didn't tell anyone she became pregnant due to the rape, had an ectopic pregnancy, a partial hysterectomy and can no longer have children as a result. She is terrified of this getting out, of having to relive this trauma in open court, of having to explain herself to strangers.
Except she already did. In the first book of the Grant Country series, she leaves the court transcript for Jeffrey to read as a way of telling him. Page 275 to 276 of the paperback edition of Blindsighted, published in 2001, reads as follows:
Q: Could you tell me what happened subsequent to the rape? A: I became pregnant from this contact, and subsequently developed an ectopic pregnancy, which is to say that an egg was implanted in my fallopian tube. There was a rupture which caused bleeding into my abdomen. Q: What effect, if any, has this had on you? A: A partial hysterectomy was performed wherein my reproductive organs were removed. I can no longer have children.
There was also no mention of her being drugged prior to the assault, so this has just been retconned in to fit the story. In addition to this, Will's aunt is called Elizabeth, not Eliza, in the book Criminal (2012), which deals with his past and she is introduced. And Faith is well and truly there, an integral part of the team, and she is aware of this aunt, but she somehow managed to forget that in this book? She is also aware of Sara's past to some extent, though I don't know that she was sure whether the rape case Sara was involved in was her own. Lazy, lazy writing. I cannot know these characters better than their author, surely?
This whole plot was basically like a redo of Pretty Girls, but with Sara and Will chucked in there to make it, what, more impactful? That book already hit pretty hard, but it started a trend of ever-increasingly graphic descriptions of rape, and it morphed into more of those descriptions coming from the perpetrators.
The thing I loved about Slaughter was the empathy she showed with these characters - they experienced trauma, sure, it's a crime novel, but they also went through the aftermath and were seen dealing with the ripple effect of that damage. Lena was by far the most polarising character in the Grant County series. She was traumatised, unstable and hanging on by her fingertips. But her experiences, while graphic, were not excessively overwritten to the point of being gratuitous. Kisscut was one of the most uncomfortable books to read, as she is dealing with the repercussions of her kidnapping and rape, but it never tips over into shock value.
By this book, I'm reading men talking about gagging some b!tch with their c0ck and in False Witness, we're treated to countless repetitions of things the rapist and pedofile said during the act.
I kept going to see if it would improve. It didn't. KS has been my go-to for crime novels for a long time, but I am beginning to lose faith in her output. It's a shame. ...more
**spoiler alert** I made an account just to review this book. I have so many feelings, most of them sucky, and I don't know what to do with them so he**spoiler alert** I made an account just to review this book. I have so many feelings, most of them sucky, and I don't know what to do with them so here goes.
What I liked:
Third person narration - I can't really stand first person, I understand it's a personal preference but it makes for less unreliable (or outright deceptive) plot devices, and you can say things about your characters you probably couldn't in first.
Quotes and chapter division - divided into five parts, titled with the stages of grief, accompanied by (sometimes) poignant quotes.
Side characters - Cat and Walter were well written, and prove the author knows how to write a well rounded, decent person. And chose not to.
Audiobook narration - January LaVoy did an excellent job with subpar material.
So now, things I did not like (of which there are many):
So much fatphobia - like, the first (of three and a half) sexual assaults is perpetrated by a very large woman. What she's doing, her actions and words and smells, are disgusting enough. There was no reason to compound it with the fact that she's fat, which is apparently also gross, other than the author's repulsion towards fat people. So, cool, then we get a bunch of teenagers insulting each other by saying they've gained weight, one time recognising that it was used just to be cruel and the other being like, I'm the only person who loves you therefore I'm being honest, and I need to unironically tell a 16 year old that her cheerleading thighs are getting fat after one pizza. Charming.
Weird racial descriptions of characters - being 1/8th black is emphasised multiple times, with it being helpful to her in prison (like sorry, but the head honcho of a drug kingdom isn't going to protect an actual stranger in prison because she can somehow discern the other is roughly 13% black. She's also half Filipino, which would obviously be more evident but apparently no one notices that), someone's skin is described as 'black coffee with a few drops of cream' (I'm paraphrasing, I listened to the audiobook and can't remember exactly), almond eyes is mentioned repeatedly. It was uncomfortable and unnecessary to the plot and I don't know why it was included.
Suspension of disbelief - all others have mentioned, you have to suspend A LOT of disbelief for this story to work. The biggest of course is that a) apparently every sexual encounter Calvin had resulted in a child, b) that all these children were given up for adoption and c) that Domenic was able, at 18, to track down both the children of a father he'd never met, and their birth mothers, some of whom have no contact, get them together and murder them, when adoption records are sealed in almost every state and country in the world. K. We also have to believe that Calvin successfully escaped prison and hasn't been found for five whole ass years, and somehow keeps up with Georgina and arrives JUST in time to save her. Sure. And that when she kills both her former rapist/abuser and current murdering incesty son, both of whom she very clearly shot at point blank range, there are no consequences. Uh huh.
Nature vs. nurture - this one was the biggest for me and it annoyed me the most. There are multiple mentions of people having 'addiction' or 'violence' genes. Let's address addiction first. While there is absolutely a genetic component to addiction, it does not guarantee that an offspring will absolutely be an addict. Nor does it preclude that if one is an addict, that they will never recover. Maybe I'm sensitive to this as I am one, but it seemed to me that in both cases of addiction and violence, the author was working from outdated and inaccurate information on both issues. So on to the violence. One of Calvin's children is described as being unruly, violent, and cruel, despite being placed in the care of loving, supportive and safe parents. This implies that nature, not nurture, has overridden this child's development and she is a tiny carbon copy of her father. Except that's not how it works, at all. One can have a propensity towards violence but - much like pot doesn't cause schizophrenia, it is merely a trigger - that violence would need a trigger. I understand that toddlers are, at their worst, uninhibited sociopaths who are only aware of their own needs and who have no emotional control, but they are also new to the world and learning and finding ways of navigating situations. Implying that her father is the cause of behavioural issues is lazy ass writing. As is Domenic, in his entirety. Yes, there are serial killers who have been adopted, or are illegitimate or unwanted - the frequency is high due to puritanical ideals of the past that only served to perpetuate shame and guilt, and thus create resentment and abandonment issues, anger and blame. Yes, adoption is a trauma in and of itself. However, the majority of traumatised individuals are strong AF, and resilient, and would die before becoming abusers themselves. And even the ones who are not strong, who understandably find it difficult to keep building themselves up when their foundation was slippery to begin with, they usually only hurt themselves. Domenic is an absolute cop out. And it's insulting. These statistics and scientific studies are out there, it feels as if the author has taken the most cursory look at 'what makes a serial killer' and run with it, without ever actually doing any in depth research.
Two more things - 1. Calvin says, 'those new murders, they're not me, I wouldn't hurt a kid.' And Georgina responds, 'I know.' Bruh, you raped and murdered a 16 year old child. Then raped another one. They were children, and Georgina is fully aware of that. C'mon now. 2. She buries her dead son next to her mother. I needed her to bury Cat in his place, to honour her second mother and acknowledge that she was more family than he was. But she didn't. And it was another insult.
All in all, this book annoyed the ever loving crap out of me and it's lazy AF in all areas that matter: character development, motivation, research, conclusions, everything. How it's rated so highly is beyond me, but then again, badly written Twilight fan fiction read by honry housewives got the UK out of a recession. Sigh.
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