Wow.... just wow. This is an amazing novel with characters that are believeable and understandable (if not likeable). You will start this and then be compelled to finish it at one sitting. The prose is beautiful, the plot is taut, but the characterization is mesmerizing.

This novel is now going to make its way across ALL FIFTY STATES! Here is the list so far:

1) cantreadenuff -- MD
2) smhamn -- OH
3) Sherria -- CT
4) Luintaurien -- NE
5) 4-tele -- IL
6) LyekkaMarengo -- PA
7) your-book-fairy -- NY
8) Everett-Reader -- WA
9) tnelson -- MI
10) Scout-Finch -- CA
11) momx3lovesbooks -- NE

Received in today's mail. Good timing, as I just finished a book and hadn't decided what to start next!

I finally finished this book, and while I'm glad I read it, it was a struggle for me. It took me quite some time to get comfortable with the style--letters to her husband talking about both the past and the present, when the reader's not in on the past. In fact, I didn't really get pulled into the book until about halfway through its 400 pages. Since I mostly read at night, I found it very difficult to stick with it when I was tired. I was not remotely sympathetic towards a mother who wasn't touched by her son from birth. Having said that, there are some very insightful passages, and some ideas will stick with me, like:

rounding up

"We had friends whose apartments were completely tricked out in sardonic kitsch--picanniny dolls, framed advertisements for Kellogg's cornflakes from the twenties ('Look at the bowlfuls go!')--who owned nothing that wasn't a joke."

Eva's description of contractions: "So the first time my insides twisted as if rung like a wet sheet..."

"...Workplace Massacre is really just School Shooting Grows Up."

"Sure, most children have a taste for spoliation. Tearing things apart is easier than making them; however exacting his preparations for Thursday, they couldn't have been nearly as demanding as it would have been to befriend those people instead. So annihilation is a kind of laziness. But it still provides the satisfaction of agency: I wreck, therefore I am."

"Yet I did warn you that children are unusually alert to artifice...."

To go in the mail today to smhamn.

Received today!!! Thanks!!

RELEASE NOTES:

I just couldn't get into this book so I am mailing to the next bookcrosser. Sherria asked to be skipped so it is off to Luintaurien. Thanks!!

Got it today. Thank you. Will read and pass on ASAP.

Couldn't get into this so passing it on.

RELEASE NOTES: