Publication date: May 2014
Format: Hardcover (467 p)
ISBN: 0062286447
Amazon price: $8.99 (Kindle)
Rating: 1/5 stars (DNF at 81%)
Synopsis: Cares-too-much social worker meets a paranoid anti-government second-coming-of-Christ homesteader while also dealing with his daughter being on the run from him and her alcoholic mother.
Trigger warnings for rape, domestic violence, dating violence, police brutality, substance abuse, sexualization of a minor (including sex work), usage of racist and ableist terms (keep in mind this takes place in the 80s), probably a shit ton of other stuff that I forgot about in my rage
(but actually don’t)
Let me tell you how I feel about this book in memes and then maybe I’ll form some coherent sentences at the bottom, so bear with me.
I gave this book the good ol’ college try, I really did. I even got the audio book to help me move through it quicker because it was such a chore to sit down and read. I picked this book to read for the Popsugar Ultimate Reading Challenge prompt “A book with a month or day of the week in the title” because it’s a cool title and it has great reviews on Goodreads. Everyone on GR 
freaking loves this book.
It’s totally another 100 Years of Solitude situation.
‘Cause let’s talk about all the rape that happens in this book plus all the super awful drug and alcohol abuse that goes on, on top of the really shitty parenting by literally EVERYONE and I have no fucking clue what’s so earth-shattering about this. Honestly with 100YoS I get that it was all ‘mAgIcaL rEaLiSm’ and introduced a whole new way of writing that I guess allows most people to totally glance over all the incest and rape and child marriage that happens without even addressing it. And maybe there’s something in the last 19% of this book that would explain why all the horrible things that happened in this book had to happen, but I may never know. Maybe one of you who actually liked this can put it in the comments.
Anyway, let’s be mature adults and talk this through. Some minor spoilers below.
The writing style. Sooooo laborious to read. Half of the book is written with no dialogue. There’s still conversation happening, it’s just told in third person. It’s extremely frustrating to read, and made me feel really separated from the events of the novel. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. I guess I can’t really explain why it bothered me so much, it just did.
The main chapters are all interspersed with these interludes, a conversation between what appears to be the reader and Pete’s daughter Rachel (or Rose). Again, in third person. Rachel/Rose talks about herself in third person. SO tiring.
All the characters. They’re all awful with the exception of one or two of the kids. I’m sure this is part of the point of the novel, but it didn’t click for me. Pete is a social worker who barely cares about his own family until his daughter goes missing. Jeremiah is slowly killing his children with his crazy conspiracy theories living in the woods. Cecil is a POS but it’s somewhat understandable given that his mother raped him, probably repeatedly. Oh yeah, this one character rapes her son. Again, I’m used to reading novels with seriously awful characters. But I couldn’t find the point to telling any of these stories.
Particularly the way the women were portrayed in this book really got to me, and that’s what made me finally throw in the towel. All of them are good-for-nothings who are damaged beyond repair and thus sleep around with anything that moves. Oh, except for the one that’s a fucking nut and lives in the woods. Was it really necessary to make every woman in this book a slave to the dong? IDK, maybe if I wasn’t so angry at #ThePatriarchy I could see past the shock value to some deeper meaning.
Real spoilers below…
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AAAAAND the last page. I’m gonna tell you what it says, because I skipped ahead to it to see. Are you ready for it? Here it is.
I don’t think I can take it, she doesn’t go back, she doesn’t at least call? Her parents are good people. They meant well. Pete helps everyone. He’s not perfect, but he tries. He’d make up for it, for lost time.
Time, yes. These things take time.
So she does go back. Eventually.
You gotta believe. You can’t just go through life acting like there are answers to every-
That’s it. It just cuts off. Seriously, fuck that and the horse it came in on. I am not going to read a nearly 500 page book for you to just cut me off in the middle of a sentence. Not after I read about the rape scenes of a 12-year-old boy, of a foster girl bounced from house to house, of a 14-year-old making her living on the street because men like how little she looks in her sneakers and jeans. I put in way too much work for that.
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