Sharp Objects
by Gillian Flynn
Summary: WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.
NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, 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 again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.
HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.
With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.
Genre: Suspense Thriller, Horror, Mystery
Where to Buy: Amazon . Barnes and Noble
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Source: I purchased a copy of this book in paperback.
Review:
I absolutely loved Sharp Objects. Murder, suspense, thrillers, and mysteries are typically books I don’t read and am very picky about. The authors people rave about are typically my least favorite. I loved Gone Girl and a few people have recommended Gillian Flynn’s other books to me, so I grabbed this on a sale table at Barnes and Noble.
Sharp Objects was so twisted. I love the tone and the voice of the narrator, Camille. Gillian Flynn has the ability to make her characters come alive on paper with all of their bitterness, complexity, complexes, issues, and personality. Camille was not just the bitter reporter cookie cutter character, but a real character with problems. When she was advised to head back to her hometown to cover a gruesome story, she reluctantly packed her bags and headed back to place she was happy to be away from.
The story sounds like your average murder thriller movie or book at first glance, but that’s what makes Gillian Flynn so talented. She takes an otherwise basic plot and turns it on its head, adding dashes of horror, darkness, insanity, and psychosis. Camille was in town to figure out if the two missing girls were linked, but she also dealt with her own childhood and parental issues while she was in town. The town itself felt suffocating and dull as Camille ran into childhood friends, acquaintances, and their children. Ideas of right and wrong, normal and abnormal, and what sorts of things women should and shouldn’t do were tossed around in the novel, which piqued my interest.
The town, the people of the town, the cops, and Camille herself had layers upon layers peeled back in Sharp Objects. For example, at first, the murder looked like two innocent and beautiful girls murdered in cold blood by what the police would assume was a sick man. But as the story progressed, the girls were less and less innocent and sweet, but more troublesome girls who danced to their own beats. And the profile of the killer didn’t fit the elegant woman a child last saw one of the girls talking to. Suddenly, a clear cut case with a clear profile of a killer wasn’t quite so clear. Nothing really made sense, which brought about questions from Camille about what women might be capable of.
I loved all of the layers and elements of Sharp Objects. Everything was complex. I highly recommend the novel. I thought the overall mystery was fairly easy to unravel later on the in the book, but I think most of that was due to be reading Gone Girl and knowing what sort of twists and directions the author is capable of. Had I not been aware, perhaps the mystery would have been less easy for me to solve. Still, though, it’s an awesome and thrilling novel that is truly dark and haunting.
