Sherry and Narcotics by Nina-Marie Gardner
My rating: 4/5 cats
i am going to preface this review by saying that i own about a billion books. and i have limited time, both in my day-to-day, and in my lifespan. i don’t have a disease or anything, but let’s face facts: mortality is a real thing.
so.
i am always trying to tear through books, so i can at least make a dent in the piles and teetering stacks of books that already exist here. so when goodreads.com authors slip into my inbox with their promises of reviewer copies and pdfs of their books, i generally turn them down because i just have too much on my plate already. however, i got a request to review this one, and the reviews were so unilaterally positive both here and on the amazon.com, just glowing and gushing, that i felt like, after i had verified with the author that they weren’t just hundreds of her friends, i had to give it a chance. plus, it sounded like a really sad and dark book, so i was powerless to resist.
and it was exactly that: a sad book full of sad and real people. a self-destructive roller-coaster written at a frenetic pace that kept me up reading it until 3:30 in the morning, even though i had been exhausted when i got home that evening at eleven, but i could not stop reading it. i needed to know how it was all going to pan out at the end, even though i knew it would not be happily.
this is not a spoiler. this is a story about two people who meet on the internet, and i think we have had enough reminders in the form of catfish and to catch a predator to have washed away any of the cheek-pinchingly naive optimism of the kind of relationships displayed in you’ve got mail. the internet is for crazy people—it is not a good place to meet friends or lovers. except here of course! on goodreads.com everyone is wonderful and everyone is exactly as advertised and you are all exceptions proving the rule. (‘cept me—i am actually a 65-year-old man with bad intentions)
this is about the impulse that drives you forward into increasingly poor decisions even when you are being hit with warning signs from a thousand different angles but not being able to slow the momentum forward into destruction because of the blindness of obsession and lust and self-loathing. it is about isolation even in a room full of people. it is about making excuses until someone else starts making the decisions.
the book incorporates many e-mails into the text, which makes it a superfast read. and there are some typos, but it didn’t bother me at all, because when they appear in the e-mails, it makes it seem more real, and some of them are just really cute, like when she refers to a “baklava-ed intruder” instead of, presumably, a “balaclava-ed intruder,” which sounds DELICIOUS!
this book is fast, and real, and painful.
a marvelous addition to the salt-in-wound body of literature.
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