many pages, not many of them good

The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber--Carolyn and I did this as a read-along type thing, and when she posts her review, it will be far more informative than this one, since I don't really do "proper" reviews. Petals is around 850 pages long, yet it comes to an abrupt end, as if the author's editor told him that he couldn't possibly expect to hold his readers past page 860, or something idiotic like that. Or maybe they sent it to a test audience. Faber obviously researched this book to get the period right (late 19th-century London), and the story definitely drew me along. But by the last fourth of the book, I started to feel like things were regressing, and after that ending, well...I couldn't, in good conscience, recommend that anyone read this, since it would be cruel to put someone through all of that for no payoff.

Prague, Arthur Phillips--I'd wanted to read this book since it came out, because the reviews were so good. When I saw it at the library, I was pretty psyched. I doubt I read 20 pages, however, because it was a pretentious piece of Gen-X expat tripe.

The Little Friend, Donna Tartt--Also long, also no payoff. Tartt is trying to do this Southern Gothic thing, but the only really gothic aspect is that you sort of want to shoot yourself for wasting your time on the book. As Rachel said, it was torture. I did want to find out what happened, so I kept reading. I read pretty quickly, fortunately, so I didn't waste tons of time on this or anything. Friend rips off To Kill a Mockingbird, Member of the Wedding, and Night of the Hunter. I'm not kidding. Might as well go back and read those books, or see the movie versions, or both. The way the reviews related the title to the story really didn't hold up for me at all, so the title ended up not making a whole lot of sense--more of that Southern Gothic wannabe stuff.

Then, at the end (and this is kind of a spoiler, but not really), Harriet, the main character, is diagnosed with epilepsy, as if that's supposed to be meaningful in the context of the story. But it isn't--the epilepsy is just tacked on there. I find that kind of irritating; if the author reveals that the main character has a chronic illness on the final page or two of a book, it should damn well mean something. Petals had a similar disease problem; the main character, Sugar, had psoriasis, and the text discussed it a lot & referred to her "tiger-like stripes," yet it didn't seem to have any purpose in the story. I couldn't even pull out my good postmodernist skills and make something up.