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Tonąca Dziewczyna (2014)

by Caitlín R. Kiernan(Favorite Author)

3.79 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Horror

publisher

MAG

review 1: I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing because it looked very much as if it had all the hallmarks that normally float my boat. I'm fascinated by mental illness and like when it is incorporated into horror stories as a way of introducing ambiguity and increasing the unreliability of the narrator. But there were various aspects to the way the story was delivered that jarred with me a little.The narrative is framed as an account of the protagonist relating her recently past haunting/mental breakdown and how it affected her and her relationships. Naturally one would expect such an account to be fragmentary and disjointed but it began to get wearing the extent to which the narrator would agonise over the verisimilitude of her account, especially when this repeatedly i... morenterrupts the flow, often an very inopportune moments.In the end, I couldn't help feeling that the whole idea was somewhat over baked. It kept building up a big mystery and the expectation that there was going to be some kind of big surprise revelation by the end and it felt a little anti-climatic.Apparently the author has also written some erotic fiction (which I haven't read) and it shows here as there were several very sexually explicit scenes that just felt a little gratuitous to me.In the afterword the author describes how difficult this book was for her to write and, in some ways, it is also quite a difficult book to read. Some times it felt almost as agonising as it was supposed to feel for the narrator to relate her story. But it was certainly an interesting and engaging read despite these faults that I will accept may just reflect my own personal tastes more than anything else.
review 2: Caitlin Kiernan has plenty of talent as a writer and in this novel manages to convey a sense of what it might be like to be in the head of a schizophrenic person. The story is occasionally captivating, occasionally boring, creepy at a few points, and provides a steady diet of ambiguity from start to finish. The main character is an extremely unreliable narrator, who isn't sure herself about what has happened, but also purposefully misdirects and confuses. However, the author's skill with words and evoking moods is largely wasted in a novel that seems pointless, soulless, and scant of helpful insight. The novel certainly failed to connect with me. Other books that I have read about people struggling with mental conditions have yielded some insight about their worth or helpful forms of interaction or heightened feelings of sharing a common human nature. But the characters were so obscured by the conflicting & unreliable accounts that they were hard to like, empathize with, or learn from. I can't think of any take-aways that I gained from the story. In addition, the promiscuous lesbian/transgender lifestyle of the main characters--with more detail than was necessary for the story--is another anchor dragging this story down. I read this book for my science fiction book club. I was hopeful that it would prove a good selection, but I really couldn't recommend it to anyone. less

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