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Rocks In The Belly (2010)

by Jon Bauer(Favorite Author)

3.55 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

review 1: There is something amazing about debut novels. The author seems more patient somehow and the story and characters are given time to expand and grow. This is an awesome read and I'll tell you why- the story is frenetic, it's harsh at times and feels like it's going a million miles an hour and while you think you've read about 20 pages you've actually just read a paragraph. That's how clever this patient author is, he has the time and passion to carefully craft each word and, while we switch between two "voices" (child and adult) it flows so perfectly. I found the story uncomfortable at times, and I certainly didn't sympathise with the main character, but I was completely emotionally sucked in and for a few hours my world was his.
review 2: This is a story about... more how a deeply troubled family produces a deeply troubled child. Our unnamed narrator is the biological son of a fostering family but feels that the foster children are treated better than he is. The family receives a permanent addition after a tragedy involving one of the foster boys leaves him gravely disabled. This story is juxtaposed with the grown up narrator “caring” for his mother, now suffering from brain cancer and dying. Overall, the characters seem to be high caricature and have very little depth. The narrator and the mother are extremely unlikable characters which make sustaining interest in the plot difficult. The scarcity of genuine emotion or humour fail to alleviate the heavy premise - which bears down suffocatingly often. If this were a real life account of someone's childhood I think that it would be hailed as a masterpiece exposé of the psychology of troubled children. Sadly, each decision the characters make steadily becomes farcical and appears to be solely to expand the plot. These downfalls leave the characters unbelievable. less

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