Genre: Adult, mystery
Summary:
"Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls. For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming."
-Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn
My Thoughts:
There are many trigger warnings for this book, I will try to keep them out of my review. Some of the major trigger warnings are: Illness, self harm, psychiatric hospitals, mental illness, sex, gore, alcohol, alcoholism
Gillian Flynn does not leave any details out. You can easily see into the mind of the protagonist and her descriptions make it easy to feel what she is going through. The writing is fantastic, but this book is not for you if you don't want to feel and experience any or all of the above listed trigger warnings. You have to give a hand to the author for writing in such a way that makes you feel so much. Most people write off this book and give it low ratings because of the dark feelings and the scary thoughts that can come from reading this book. I think this book deserves a higher rating because of how effective the author is at conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.
The characters are very well voiced. There is a difference between each character and you can really get the feel for them as if you were meeting them yourself.
The mystery is very well done. You can start guessing about who is doing what fairly easy, but you cannot guess how deep or how far they will go. (Or at least I didn't)
The only real problem I had was that we don't really learn much about the protagonist from the beginning. It takes a very long time to know why the protagonist is acting the way she is. The summary states that she had a stay in the psych hospital, but you wouldn't know that until over halfway through the book. It would have been nice to have these background details earlier so we could understand better about the protagonist.
Overall this is a very relatable novel. I gave it 3/5 stars because the book was almost too relatable for me and I didn't like how some details weren't revealed until the end which took away from the experience of reading the first half of the book. I didn't like the way this book made me feel, so the rating is a bit lower just because of my own opinions and feelings for this book. It just wasn't for me.
I recommend this book for adults who want a dark and twisted read.
