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jazzy_daveCatherine O'Flynn "What Was Lost" (Holt Paperbacks)
‘What Was Lost’ is a great story about a lost little girl, and about people who are connected in a way or another with the fictional Green Oaks shopping centre. I found the book very interesting and unique in many ways.
The inner lives and sensations, the social interactions and patterns, and the ordinary humdrum life mix and split in the book in original ways. The characters are well crafted: they're ordinary people, but the representation of their lives, decisions and thoughts is not dull, but insightful.
The multifaceted title of the book encourage the reader to complement the thematical spheres. Also the letters of anonymous members of the community emphasize the human and social agenda, so that we’re not dealing with a mere superficial crime novel.
I liked the themes that I found on my reading in the book: one's loyalty to one's self vs. habitual conformity, superficial level of acts vs. mental structures we share, how we face changes this consumer society is leading us into.
The way the story closes makes it a credible and fully developed plot - and guarantees it a place among the crime fiction. I would've liked to see it left open, to leave the reader with various choices - as if to leave it open whether Kate was a girl of blood and flesh or if she was an angel or a conceptual primus motor behind the lives of the characters of the events, or even behind the converging epicentre the Green Oaks shopping centre was.
The discourse is both fluent and natural, and yet has some faltering in it. The style and structure that the author has decided to write is fluent and natural for most of the book. Still, the ways the character’s personalities are present or hidden in the narrator’s discourse do falter a bit. The decision to put in the anonymous letters (in italics), and still mix character’s personal style into the narrator’s part (like Kate’s in the beginning) would have needed some further revision.
This is a great little story, and an easy read for any long journey.
‘What Was Lost’ is a great story about a lost little girl, and about people who are connected in a way or another with the fictional Green Oaks shopping centre. I found the book very interesting and unique in many ways.
The inner lives and sensations, the social interactions and patterns, and the ordinary humdrum life mix and split in the book in original ways. The characters are well crafted: they're ordinary people, but the representation of their lives, decisions and thoughts is not dull, but insightful.
The multifaceted title of the book encourage the reader to complement the thematical spheres. Also the letters of anonymous members of the community emphasize the human and social agenda, so that we’re not dealing with a mere superficial crime novel.
I liked the themes that I found on my reading in the book: one's loyalty to one's self vs. habitual conformity, superficial level of acts vs. mental structures we share, how we face changes this consumer society is leading us into.
The way the story closes makes it a credible and fully developed plot - and guarantees it a place among the crime fiction. I would've liked to see it left open, to leave the reader with various choices - as if to leave it open whether Kate was a girl of blood and flesh or if she was an angel or a conceptual primus motor behind the lives of the characters of the events, or even behind the converging epicentre the Green Oaks shopping centre was.
The discourse is both fluent and natural, and yet has some faltering in it. The style and structure that the author has decided to write is fluent and natural for most of the book. Still, the ways the character’s personalities are present or hidden in the narrator’s discourse do falter a bit. The decision to put in the anonymous letters (in italics), and still mix character’s personal style into the narrator’s part (like Kate’s in the beginning) would have needed some further revision.
This is a great little story, and an easy read for any long journey.
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Date: 2014-04-04 09:36 am (UTC)Hugs, Jon
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Date: 2014-04-04 02:53 pm (UTC)