Sharp Objects: A Novel by Gillian Flynn
I don’t have HBO, so when I am offered a book with Amy Adams on the cover with a sticker that says “Now an HBO Limited Series Starring Amy Adams” I take that book. It didn’t hurt that the author is Gilligan Flynn and I enjoyed her novel Gone Girl. I even enjoyed the movie Gone Girl, which is rare. The movie almost never holds up to the book. In this case, the movie did the book justice.
The problem showed up when I tried my best NOT to compare Sharp Objects to Gone Girl. In Sharp Objects a small town girl who escaped to the big city to be a mediocre journalist gets sent back to that home town to investigate a missing little girl, a case with similarities to a murdered little girl from the year before. I was hoping for the depth of story we got from two intertwined stories told from the point of view of the two main characters. I didn’t get that.
I guess it is difficult to follow any popular work of art. I tried to be a good reader and judge this story on its own merits. And don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed reading it. I didn’t even care I could see the big plot twists from the first few dozen pages. I just hoped for a more complex story.
I left this book feeling the same way I did after reading the fourth book in ‘The Girl in the Spider’s Web’ series. The original author died after the first three. The author’s estate hired another writer to finish the incomplete ideas for a fourth book. While the characters were famiar, and the plot lines continued, the depth and complexity of the writing was just not the same. Same as in ‘Sharp Objects.’
I’m not mad I spent the time reading it, but I’m glad I only had to invest a couple of hours into the reading of this book. Maybe the HBO series was a bit better.
Wayne Snitzky
DOC #312456
