A good story, but not as engaging as most of Quinn's other books. I'm very pleased to know about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, though!A good story, but not as engaging as most of Quinn's other books. I'm very pleased to know about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, though!...more
At first I was all set to give this five stars. It's an interesting story well told (if sloppily edited in places), with some good points to make abouAt first I was all set to give this five stars. It's an interesting story well told (if sloppily edited in places), with some good points to make about the true-crime industry, and one of the fictional podcasts "quoted" in the text is clearly based on Last Podcast On the Left and the tone is hilariously accurate. (I like the podcast but many of their older episodes have not aged well.)
But then I found out how much of the details of the murder were lifted from real incidents, specifically the murder of Shanda Sharer, and my opinion plummeted. There isn't any indication of this in the acknowledgements and I feel like that immediately invalidates the book's criticism of true crime as being exploitative. It's nearly as blatant as The Girls (but Clark is a better writer than Cline, to be fair).
However, it did make me think about true crime as "entertainment," even though that feels like a weird word. For the record, there is absolutely nothing new about people's obsession with it. True crime has had its ups and downs in terms of popularity, but just look at stuff like the Bonnie and Clyde car, or people taking "souvenirs" from Belle Gunness's farm, or the fact that Lizzie Borden's house has been a B&B since the 1990s. I'm not prepared to talk about why people are so interested in this stuff, or why it's gotten so much more popular in the last decade or so, but here we are. There's certainly a right way and a wrong way to go about it, though, and everybody is going to draw that line in a different place. I don't have any big overarching theories, it's just an interesting thing to think about....more
Oy, what a mess. New story elements and character traits coming out of nowhere, plot holes and dropped threads galore (where the hell did Nate go?), aOy, what a mess. New story elements and character traits coming out of nowhere, plot holes and dropped threads galore (where the hell did Nate go?), and apparently I need to read this whole other series to even understand what happened. A very disappointing ending. ...more
This felt kind of like a mashup of The Dark Tower, American Gods, and Neverwhere, with maybe a bit of Murderbot thrown in for spice. It's a bit derivaThis felt kind of like a mashup of The Dark Tower, American Gods, and Neverwhere, with maybe a bit of Murderbot thrown in for spice. It's a bit derivative, maybe, but I still enjoyed the story a hell of a lot and I'm excited to see where it goes next....more
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