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Wednesday, June 25, 2008

I read Laura Lippman's What The Dead Know because it was in The Morning News' Tournament of Books. I liked it quite a bit even though I guessed one twist really early on. I thought it was pretty well-written too. It inspired me to check out a bunch of her other books, but unfortunately they were less compelling. The Power Of Three felt like it was missing something and fell just short of being good. Some parts of the mystery were really obvious right away and it wasn't exactly the definitive book on destructive teenage friendships. But the one that made me decide I was pretty much done with Lippman was Every Secret Thing. The second the character Alice was described as "fat" at the beginning of the book I knew she was the guilty one. This feeling was only confirmed as she was then described as a "heavyset blond woman... trudging along" and "a hulking, almost obese woman." Oh, but then came the kicker: "Nancy willed herself not to let her eyes drift down to the indistinct bulk beneath Alice's bright pink t-shirt. The girl had to weigh almost two hundred pounds. God help her if she had weighed more when she came home." Seriously, what the actual fuck? 200 pounds? She clearly has no idea of what 200 pounds looks like and by that time I was so over the book and, by extension, Lippman, that I took back the rest I had checked out without even bothering opening them.

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