Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn
Fast Facts
- An ever-welcome recommendation from my friends, Ali and Mary Beth (Ali's excellent running/life blog can be found here)
- Sharp Objects is Flynn's debut novel, and has likely gotten additional press and readers after her smash hit in 2012, Gone Girl (the movie trailer for which, my childhood crush on Ben Affleck aside, looks a bit meh)
- 321 pages by my Kindle count
- Features dead little girls missing teeth, and the strongest contender ever for World's Most Dysfunctional Family
Gillian Flynn is utterly terrifying. I'm pretty sure that I read Gone Girl on a beach, and jumped out of my skin every time I heard an ocean wave or felt a loose strand of hair in the breeze. Sharp Objects is also a novel very much in that vein (if you didn't already figure it out from a glance at that blunt cover art.)
The premise of Sharp Objects is that narrator Camille, a journalist at a second-tier daily paper outside of Chicago, is sent by her editor back to Wind Gap, Missouri, the small town where she grew up, to break a story on a small child who has gone missing.
Wind Gap is full of all kinds of heart-warming memories for Camille. It's where her horrible mother and stepfather reside, with her horrible half-sister, Amma. It's where Camille's beloved other half-sister, Marian, died as a child. It's where Camille's family owns a pig slaughterhouse. It's where Camille was gang raped and abused in a myriad of ways as a young teenager, and it's where she began cutting herself.
As if this jolly background were not enough, the missing girl Camille is reporting on is quickly found: she has been murdered, like another young girl less than a year prior in the same town, and both victims have had all of their teeth removed.
The Redeeming, and the Not-So-Redeeming
Readers of Gone Girl will be looking for a twist in Sharp Objects (ouch) - I certainly was, and was fairly sure I knew Flynn's game early on. By the end, I was satisfied to have been (somewhat) tricked, having somehow, inexplicably underestimated just how sick Flynn could be.
Flynn certainly delivers a suspenseful page-turner with this debut, and Camille has some surprising complexity, in particular her brand of feminism borne of abuses, which is thought-provoking and disturbing.
Still, some of the book gave me deja vu, presenting ideas and people that felt recycled or overdone or heavy-handed. I didn't guess the ending, but really could and should have (I don't read too many crime novels - see the light sleeping, above). Of the two books, Gone Girl strikes me as more creative and sophisticated with regard to its plotting, character development, and suspense.
Bottom Line
Despite some of my nitpicking, and the ridiculous ending (another similarity Sharp Objects shares with Gone Girl!), I absolutely devoured Sharp Objects (ouch again). It made me stay up too late and wake up too early, and generally ranks high on entertainment value. It's a fast read and just what the doctor ordered for a quick, summertime scare fest.
