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Mr. Lamb (2014)

by Bonnie Nadzam(Favorite Author)

3.38 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

dtv

review 1: I found this book quite disturbing. For me the 'abductor' David Lamb is manipulative and creepy. Nadzam very cleverly leads us step by step along the grooming process. However, if you approach this book from another perspective you could perhaps think there was some justification to Lamb's behaviour, and leaving in that possibility of multiple interpretations is the mark of a powerful writer. Although it did remind me somewhat of 'Lolita' it is certainly a gripping read and beautifully written.
review 2: Lamb is a beautiful, thought-provoking, and disturbing book. David Lamb is a man whose world is slowly crumbling. He’s lost his father, his marriage, his job at a company he founded. Through a series of slow (and desperate) acts, he befriends and eventually ... moreabducts an eleven-year-old girl named Tommie, taking her West from her Chicago home to a farmhouse somewhere in the Rockies he claims was owned by his father. Lamb is a shallow and manipulative man in many ways, but he is no Humbert Humbert, and Tommie is no Lolita. If anything, Lamb (who tells Tommie his name is Gary) and Tommie have a chemistry born of a shared desire to be understood by and belong to someone. In many ways, Lamb’s abduction and—I guess the best word for it is education, for he wants to teach her about life but also to name plants and trees, to fish and to survive in the wilderness—of Tommie is a selfless act. He imagines her life is difficult overall, her mother neglectful, her friends cruel. He wants what is best for her, but he also wants something from her, something she is not equipped to offer. I should probably mention here that there is no overt seduction in a purely sexual sense (there are weirdly romantic overtones), but Lamb is no less disturbing for that fact. On top of that we have Nadzam’s knockout prose, which is both lyrical and sinister in all the right ways. (For example, she uses a third-person narrator who frequently refers to Lamb as “our guy,” making the reader complicit in the “hero’s story.”) The reader wants Lamb to get caught, but also on some level to get away with it so that he can, in the end, do the right thing and take Tommie home. Lamb, Nadzam's debut, is suspenseful, itchy, and wonderfully written. less

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