This novel is just so outlandish that I am aghast that a publisher would let such sheer and utter nonsense into print without heavy editing-because there is, actually, the makings of a decent narrative here, but it is so psychologically improbable that it boggles the mind that an editor did not send this back to the author for some major re-working of the characters and their motives. But it is monumentally difficult to suspend my disbelief to the point that I can buy the characters in this novel as being even remotely real, non-crazy (all of them: Nora, Clare, and James would have to be insane to think and behave as they do in this novel) human beings. I can believe in magic and aliens and alternate histories and all other sorts strangeness. I can suspend my disbelief easily for fiction. And she plans to frame Nora, a woman whom she has not even seen since that break-up of 10 years ago, for the murder. Clare plans to murder James so that she will not be humiliated by being dumped by James and by being exposed for her evil, teen-aged deeds. And this from a character, James, who, we are told, has himself been a profligately promiscuous man, sleeping with numerous women and men before finally deciding-at least until this revelation about Clare's adolescent antics-to settle down with Clare.Īnd so Clare, faced with the prospect of losing her fiance and being held up to public shame by all the people who care what she did when she was only 16, decides that the best course of action for her to take would be-what else?-to murder James and to frame Nora for the murder. Yes, this grown man is so shaken by the revelation of some stupid adolescent hi-jinks from a decade ago that he is going to dump his fiancee. However, one person does actually judge Clare harshly for her action: the even more ludicrously ridiculous James, who is on the verge of breaking off his engagement with Clare when he learns, a decade later, what Clare had done just as he and Clare are about to get married. What world does Clare live in where she thinks adults actually take seriously and hold grudges over stupid adolescent behavior that happened in the distant past? Yes, Clare is afraid that she will be judged and ridiculed now, at age 26 (like Nora), because when she was 16, she played a mean, nasty, adolescent trick on Nora and made Nora think that James had dumped her. Now, what's more ridiculous than a grown woman who cannot get over a break-up that happened a decade previously when she was an adolescent? How about her former best friend, Clare-who is now, rather conveniently, engaged to James, Nora's previous boyfriend, the one who broke her heart-fearing that people will hate her and be disgusted by her because when she, Clare, was 16, she basically caused the break-up between Nora and James by sending a break-up text to Nora from James's phone-unbeknownst to James-so that Nora would think that the text was really from James? A break-up that happened 10 years ago! Sheeesh! Because of a break-up with her teen-aged boyfriend. The break-up was brought on by her unexpected teen pregnancy (which she aborted), but Nora herself makes it clear that she was not upset so much by the pregnancy or the abortion: it was the break-up with James that has left her an emotional wreck as an adult, unable to form stable, long-term relationships. My god, but you would think the world all but ended when she broke up with her boyfriend, James, over ten years ago, and, yes,
Yes, 16! What kind of loser is so affected by an adolescent relationship that she or he allows it to poison all of her or his adult relationships? I'll tell you what kind of loser: the whiny, childish, immature, insipid Nora. She is a 26-year-old woman who is still haunted by and distraught over a break-up that happened when she was 16.
To be fair, I didn't hate Nora so much as find myself repulsed by her. Earlier this year, I found Rachel, the protagonist of The Girl on the Train, to be annoying and very unlikable, but I didn't hate her. Yes, 16! What kind of loser is so affected by an adolescent relations I don't think I've disliked a protagonist as much as Nora, the main character in In a Dark, Dark Wood, in ages.
I don't think I've disliked a protagonist as much as Nora, the main character in In a Dark, Dark Wood, in ages.
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