The Rapture by Liz Jensen
My rating: 3/5 cats
i don’t know what my problem is.
for anyone else, this would probably be a four- or five-star cat book, and looking through my friends list, it seems to indeed be the case. and i am thrilled, because i love liz jensen and she gets very little play in this country—most of her books are out of print, and the last two didn’t even come out in paperback here, so i am holding onto these two sad hardcover copies in the hopes that someone will happen upon them and buy them.
there is so much good in this book, but it was just missing something. “what was it missing, karen?? where is your book?? YOU THINK YOU CAN DO BETTER??”
no, i most certainly cannot.
i am no writer, but i am a pretty decent reader. and liz jensen is a fine writer, who usually has this indefinable spark to her writing. a low-level thrum in the underwriting. she is dangerous and funny and unexpected. and there is some of that here, but a lot of this reads like a well-constructed thriller, the kind that they make into a “redefining the genre” movie like The Silence of the Lambs or Primal Fear. it is very good, but it didn’t make me dance.
but i don’t want to diminish this—she manages some pretty tricky things in this novel. when i was reading/reviewing Ship Breaker, i made a point of mentioning that the global-warming stuff was very nearly off-putting, but he didn’t push the button hard enough to make me completely queasy. now liz jensen, she throws her whole body on that button and gyrates around, but for some reason, it didn’t bother me. it was like watching my body on an operating table: i was thinking “this should be bothering me, but it isn’t.”
she has a skill, this one.
and the ending is simply perfect. i will in no way spoil it by saying that there was an easy way out, and a “satisfying” way out, and a “reasonable” way out. and liz jensen took the most complicated choice, the one that was probably the most difficult to write, and wrote it very well. my hat is off to her. she leaves the reader feeling uneasy, which is the best thing she could have done.
i do recommend this book, because it is very good, but in the spectrum of “liz jensen books i have loved,” this one is just lower than most.
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