Sharp Objects: A Novel

(Original review appears in Pantheon Magazine at http://pantheonmag.com/book-review-sharp-objects-by-gillian-flynn/)At some point in most novels, a paragraph or single sentence, cleverly situated in a way that isn’t expository, etches in thumbnail the major theme of a work. The better ones find ways to incorporate it as direct function of character, as in the following:"I felt no particular allegiance to this town. This was the place my sister died, the place I started cutting myself. A town so suffocating and small, you tripped over people you hated every day. People who knew things about you. It’s the kind of place that leaves a mark."So muses Camille Preaker, Gillian Flynn’s restless reporter and sardonic anti-heroine from her debut novel, Sharp Objects. With the current buzz still humming over her latest book, Gone Girl—with film adaptation by David Fincher slated for October of 2014—revisiting her first book seems an apropos primer of this dark and penetrating author.Camille’s a journalist for The Daily Post, the “fourth largest in Chicago,” a newspaper with its head barely above water, and whose editor, Frank Curry, mines the cold-case files for the next human interest tale sure to snag a Pulitzer. When the disappearance of a second girl occurs in the town of Wind Gap, Missouri, he dispatches the reluctant Camille at once to get the scoop.There’s only one problem: Wind Gap is Camille’s home town. Wind Gap hasn’t been good to Camille, a place she has shunned for eight years. A place she describes as “One of those crummy towns prone to misery.” She says this not from dread, but from a quietly haunting intimacy with torment. At the start of the novel, we learn that Camille’s been freshly released into the world after spending several months under psychiatric care. She’s a cutter, specifically of words. Her body is a monument to insecurity and anger, starting at the age of thirteen with Wicked carved into her left hip, and stopping at twenty-nine with Vanish. The only unmarred spot on her body is a circle of perfect skin the size of a fist, on the small of her back which she could never reach.As with most any self-mutilation, it’s but the physical manifestation of deeper emotional traumas, in Camille’s case prompted by the death of her younger sister, Marian, from an ambiguous illness. The tension surrounding this mysterious passing serves as lynchpin for her strained relationship with her mother, Adora, Wind Gap’s unspoken matriarch. Wealthy, priggish, steeped in passive-aggressiveness and secrets, Adora is never sparing of her disdain for Camille, telling her in a casual manner: “You remind me of my mother. Joya. Cold and distant and so, so smug. My mother never loved me either. And if you girls won’t love me, I won’t love you.”The other of the girls she refers to is Camille’s half-sister, Amma, a sexually hyper-developed thirteen year-old who heads a clique of equally spiteful girls, and who in many ways is her mother’s equal in cruelty and malice.Rattling between the warring factions of her mother and step-sister, Camille attempts to investigate the abduction-murders in Wind Gap. When the missing girl, Ann Nash, turns up dead not long after her arrival in town—found strangled within a cleft between two buildings, her teeth yanked out (a virtual carbon-copy of the first victim, Natalie Keen)—Camille finds little help from the male authorities. Men view her as suspicious, an outsider with a dubious agenda, yet the scorn doesn’t surprise or upset Camille. She’s used to it. Other than her boss, Frank, who’s a well-meaning but scattershot father-figure, men are often portrayed as dichotomies rather than with any subtlety or depth. They’re afterthoughts, fleeting, a part of the scenery. This isn’t a detriment to the book; they are as Camille sees them based on her experiences. Bill Vickery, the police chief, is an all-business cipher, dismissive of theories that don’t fit his own. The fathers in the book, namely those of the two victims, as well as her own step-father, Alan, are ineffectual and milquetoast. Even one of the chief suspects, the second victim’s father, Bob Nash, is such a laconic wallflower that even Camille’s suspicion of him is passive.Her impulse is to be drawn towards the damaged sorts. The dark and the indifferent. She says of some teenage boys preening on the street: "Those kids, cocky and pissed and smelling like sweat, aggressively oblivious of our existence, always compelled me."Two men eventually serve this function for Camille. The first is a cocksure detective visiting from Kansas City, Richard Willis. His interest in Camille is obvious to her from the start, and though attracted to him as well, she’s apprehensive. She keeps him at arm’s length, at first engaging in a mutual pact of information gathering from his end in exchange for company and candor from hers. But the dearth of intimacy in her life eventually topples the pact into the sexual, albeit mostly clothed in Camille’s case, as she’s reluctant to let any man know that she’s a cutter.That revelation is ultimately bestowed upon John Keen, the second victim’s older brother and on-again, off-again murder suspect in what passes for the book’s most tender, affectionate scene in a roadside motel.It isn’t long though before Camille realizes that her best chance to secure clues or leads resides within the secretive cliques of female enmity prevalent in Wind Gap. It is a private world where women hurt each other both overtly and passively, even at funerals. Where gossip is both weapon and shield, wielded for social advancement. This antagonism lies at the core of Sharp Objects. The book is less murder mystery and more an exploration of the cruelty that women inflict upon one another, be it friend to friend, classmate to classmate, sister to sister, or mother to daughter—all of which play a role, often spanning multiple generations.Not even the two murder victims are immune from this hostility, as it is gradually learned through Camille’s piecemeal interrogations of witnesses and suspects. The first victim, Natalie, had assaulted a female classmate back in Philadelphia; “They saved her left eye,” is all we’re left to know. The second victim, Natalie, is a chronic biter, one of her victims being Adora who used to watch over both girls at different points, thus relegating her eventually to the suspect list.But the cruelty isn’t limited to others. They’re just as adept in dispensing it upon themselves. Self-abuse runs rampant, from Adora’s intractable plucking out of her eyebrows while tending to her dying daughter, Marian, to Camille’s equally impulsive drinking and cutting, the latter acting as a coping refrain throughout.Number of synonyms for “anxious” carved in my skin: eleven, she ponders at one point. Later on it’s, Unworthy flared up in my leg, followed by, Belittle burned on my right hip, and so the scoring goes.At the heart of it all burns a generational war over control, status, and vanity. Camille and Adora’s relationship, cleaved forever with the death of Marian, is in a persistent state of escalation, even in absentia. Upon Camille’s return to Wind Gap, Adora wastes no time exercising all the petty cruelties and power-plays while shamelessly utilizing the plausible deniability of victimhood, all of which Camille is privy to from the get go.Every tragedy that happens in the world happens to my mother, and this more than anything about her turns my stomach.Adora’s grief at having lost Marian has become a virtual hobby, one that she attempts to relive again through her two other daughters. Camille soon realizes that the milk and pills Adora’s been giving them both as “relaxants,” are in actuality making them sicker by the day, especially Amma who’s been subjected to it longer. This prompts Camille to track down the nurse that ministered to Marian during her final days, and through the rediscovering of original medical files that had been tampered with, it is learned that Adora had been slowly poisoning her first daughter for years.Much of this serves the logistical and procedural facets of the book however, which in many respects is the least important aspect of an otherwise compelling but ruthless character study of a woman at war to wrest her identity from history and genetics. When the killer of the two girls is eventually “revealed,” you’re more beleaguered by the inevitability of it than you are shocked. But it’s only because Flynn has artfully played with genre expectations and structures to lead one to such a conclusion. A twist is added near the end that upends the original reveal, and it’s a shocking revelation if unexpected, a sad one if anticipated. A kind of perverse circle has closed, and in the middle sits Camille, perhaps finally with the determination to pierce through it.

I haven't read a book for fun in maybe 7+ years and this is the one I chose to read!!! It's intriguing yet paced well, I would recommend this book to everyone!:D

You really have to be a fan of dark and disturbing novels to enjoy this book. If you are, it doesn’t disappoint at all. I wish I could wipe my brain and read it again for the first time. 10/10

This one had me hooked within the first few pages especially because the story took off running and... Oh. Emm. Gee. It didn't stop until the last page. There were several times within the last 8 pages that I either mumbled to myself, my eyes about popped out, said "Whaaaaaaa?" or gasped loud enough for the hubby to ask if everything was alright. The reason for the last reaction I can't share here because it would be a spoiler, but I can't wait to talk about since this was this month's book club book.Awesome. Book.

Oppressive southern atmosphere permeates the plot. Writing is fabulous. Every sentence is a spring of intellectual pleasure.

After reading Flynn's second book, Dark Places, earlier this year I couldn't get enough of her and wanted to read her first book. Like I said in my review of Dark Places, if Flynn writes more (and I hope she does) then she has a loyal fan in me. While Sharp Objects doesn't quite have the intensity that Dark Places showed us, it's still just as good.In it, we meet Camille Preaker, a Chicago reporter who returns to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri to look into the story of two young teen girls who went missing and were later found dead and missing all of their teeth. The local police have no leads and have called in help from Kansas City to assist in the investigation. Locals have their own suspicions and small town gossips abounds.But Flynn doesn't serve us just another cookie cutter mystery. Much of the book is about Camille attempting to reconnect with her well-to-do Mom who owns the local pig abattoir, Mom's stiff squeaky husband, and her bizarre attention-hungry young sister named Amma. As Camille jumps head first into the case and attempts to get a good quote on record from the parents of the deceased or the Kansas City investigator, she rediscovers what she reminisces of her years growing up in the smalltown of Wind Gap and we learn more about her and the pain she has lived. Camille is a cutter, carving various words literally all over her body. And to make things worse, her Mom is a hypochondriac.I had the killer pegged as soon as I met them, but constantly second guessed myself as Flynn leads you away from the mystery at hand and deeper into the psyche of Camille, her sister, and her mother. Camille pays visits to the girls she grew up with and went to high school with, desperate to break something in the case, but in the process it all comes back to her sad mother and her bully sister, who apparently rules the school with her pretentious attitude. Camille also develops a physical relationship with the investigator who refuses to budge on giving Camille something she can use in her story.Just like Flynn's second book, the characters here are all ticking time bombs of emotion and turmoil. You love them. You hate them. You love to hate them. In fact, you become so emotionally attached to them yourself that you just can't put the book down. Throw in a gritty murder mystery to solve and you have the perfect recipe for a book that I just can't stop thinking about.

Awesome story. Look forward to watching the show.

Senza spoiler: il libro è veramente scorrevole, non si perde in descrizioni ( per me che non ho un ottimo inglese fantastico) e va da una scena all'altra presentando quasi solo elementi utili allo svolgersi della trama.Non so se il problema è il mio inglese, e la mancanza di tutto il vocabolario che mi serviva, ma penso che i personaggi siano stati ritratti superficialmente senza mai andare in profondità.La sensazione finale che mi è rimasta è di aver letto pezzi di un bel libro, di cui mancavano pagine a riempire i personaggi!Spoiler: quel che mi è piaciuto di più è stato scoprire una sindrome di cui non ne conoscevo l'esistenza

2006年発表の作者デビュー作。徒に刺激的な描写に走ることなく、事件の起きた田舎町、そこに住む人々、それらの過去から現在を淡々と丁寧になぞっていきます。ネタばれにならないように言えば、近年話題にされることが多くなった、人間の心の深層に潜む意外な闇とそれゆえに各人が「壊れていく」様がテーマで、それが家族という最小生活単位の中で起きるとどうなるかが濃密に、しかも親子3代に亘って描かれます。勿論怖いのですが、寧ろ浮ばれない（？）、暗澹たる気持ちになります。そして親子とは何か、愛するとは、愛されるとは何か考えさせられます。物語の流れからいって、最後に主人公に危機が訪れる選択肢もあったでしょうが、敢えてそれをしなかった所に作者のセンスが窺われます。表紙も洒落てます。

Il primo romanzo che leggo di questa autrice, ho visto di recente anche l'adattamento in serie, che è ben fatto ma nonostante tutto perde qualcosa - in parte è naturale-specialmente molto sul finale. Ho apprezzato molto la visione netta, cruda e senza filtro della voce narrante e la capacità di comunicare sia le sensazioni intime della protagonista sia dell'ambiente circostante (si percepiscono il caldo e l'afa, mentre si legge!). Sorprende sino alla fine, quando meno te lo aspetti.

Davvero molto interessante! A tratti forse è un po' lento ma riesce comunque a tenerti attaccato a leggere pagina dopo pagina! Lo consiglio vivamente e vi assicuro che è, come sempre, MOLTO meglio della serie tv!

Libro molto bello e consigliato a tutti gli amanti dei gialli!