The Book: Break the Skin, by Lee Martin

The Story: Laney is kind of this mixed up teenager.  She doesn’t want to finish school or live with her mom or really do much of anything except sing.  When she meets 35 year old Delilah, they immediately see themselves in each other and become fast friends. Soon after they move in to a trailer together and work together and just become all tangled up in each other’s lives. Laney falls for this guy Lester and through him, Laney “accidentally” becomes involved in a horrible crime.

Across the country, Miss Baby is a single, lonely woman who comes across this confused, stray guy on the street.  She takes him in and makes up a whole new history for him.  The new guy is, of course, Lester and he is on the run.

Will Miss Baby figure out Lester’s real identity? Will Laney and Lester get pinned for their crime? Yadda yadda.

What I Thought: Last year sometime, I read The Bright Forever, and while it was dark, I thought it was pretty good and well written for sure.

I have to be honest: I was not quite as impressed with this one.

For me the problem was the characters.  They all felt grimy and sticky and gross.  I seriously felt almost uncomfortable reading about their lives.  They were just needy and crooked and mean and… yuck…. and these are the characters we are supposed to care about!  Laney was just awful. Seriously.  She is the kind of person I avoid on purpose.  Is that rude? Mabye, but it’s the truth.  Miss Baby was better, but not by much.  Their lives were all the things that make Jerry Springer unwatchable.  Just these low-class, uneducated, mean people just living for themselves and leaving this drama in their wake.  I hate that.  I didn’t care what happened because I didn’t care about these people.

There is something to be said about writing a book that takes place in a trailer park instead of the suburbs, but the whole point is that he didn’t write characters who spoke to me in any way at all.

I have to say that the mystery and storyline itself were pretty compelling and I never really felt like quitting the book, I just felt yucky the whole time I was reading it.

Conclusion: For a better Lee Martin book, read The Bright Forever.  For a better Wal-Mart crowd book, read Billie Letts.  For a better book involving amnesia, read the Bourne Trilogy.  For a better murder mystery, read Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian.  You see where I’m going.  This is not the best in any class that it’s in, so I’d say skip it and spend your time with a better book.

The Book: The Bright Forever, by Lee Martin

The Story: What is it with me and kidnapping/kids in peril  books? I am all about them right now.

This one is about a little girl, Katie, who gets snatched from her small town on the way to the library.  As the book unfolds, there are a lot of different characters that come out of the woodwork.  Notably, her math tutor, who at first comes off as a sweet guy who has fallen on bad luck but is then revealed to be more and more of a pervert.  There’s also Clare, an older lady who has recently remarried after being widowed.  Her new husband, Raymond R., is kind of a creeper, but again- is made out to be a nice guy.

Early in the story, Katie goes missing and the rest of the book is tacked together from different points of view (all the aforementioned characters, along with members of Katie’s family) and different times- some past, some present, and some written from the future looking back.  Little by little more is revealed that make different characters seem suspicious and lay out possible scenarios.

The question of  who is “guilty” is answered at the end of the book, but questions of responsibility leave this book with a bit of lingering tension.  Because the book is written from so many points of view, the reader gets to get into a lot of different heads who are all posing their own “what if I had…” questions.

What I Thought: I liked this one.  I didn’t love it- it didn’t move me enough for that- but I did like it.

What did it for me, I think, was the shifting points of view.  This isn’t anything new. I’ve read that before 1,000 times.  However, this time the actual voices changed.  It was actually like seeing the story through 5 or  6 different perspectives and that made the story that much more real for me.

The other thing that I really enjoyed was the actual town that the characters lived in.  It was a small town in Indiana, and for me it was like a character in and of itself.  I totally got it.  I felt like I was there.  The little class-wars, the nice but creepy guys, being a little girl with her friend just killing hours on the back porch.  Maybe that is what got me about this book. I’ve been a little girl riding my bike barefoot to return books to the library.  I could just see myself in this setting and it made the book come alive.

The fact that this book was nominated for the Pulitzer, however, is kind of beyond what I can grasp.  It was good and all… but Pulitzer nominated good? Probably not. Eh.

Conclusion: I need to read a cheerier book where all the kids are safe and happy.