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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576943.Lisey_s_Story_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Lisey's Story: A Novel" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1175957312m/576943.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/576943.Lisey_s_Story_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Lisey's Story: A Novel</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3389.Stephen_King">Stephen King</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/18575054?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 2 of 5 stars<br/>A famous writer's widow can't get over his death. A seedy professor is trying to weasel her husband's papers out of her. When she puts him off, he ends up sicking a violent "persuader" on her. Meanwhile, one of her sisters is a mental case, prone to cutting and catatonic fits. Throw in another world you can only get to through imagination, where the water will heal you and everything else will kill you after dark, and the whole thing gets messy. <br/> <br/>The problem here is that the story, towards the late middle, is told in so many flashbacks within flasbacks within flashbacks that you're never quite sure which part of the timeline you're on. But if you've reached that point of the book, you're not really reading for the plot anymore anyway... which is a good thing, because this book has a lot of great stuff in it, and very little has anything to do with the story. <br/> <br/>King can still throw down some good words with the best of them. The parts of the book dealing with the writer and his childhood and marriage were outstanding. Really well done. The problem is that the most interesting character in the book is dead from page one. It's supposed to be his wife's story, but by her own admission she's not very smart, not very funny, not very creative or clever. And it doesn't take you long to take her word for it, either. <br/> <br/>If this book would have been around 300 or 400 pages long, it would have been a killer. Instead you get a half-assed thumbnail sketch of a mystical imagination land, some lame subplot about the trials and tribulations of sisterhood between middle aged women, and a lot of sappy "I will survive" feminism. And you know that she WILL survive, because it doesn't take many pages for you to realize that King's in love with his own character, to the point where he'd never let anything too bad happen to her for very long. <br/> <br/>(I say bring back Bachman. Those books all have great characters in them, and he doesn't seem to worry about saving anybody, whether they desrve it or not.) <br/> <br/>The most irritating thing of all? Apparently King has developed a fascination with people making a clicking noise when they swallow, because he brings it up about 25 times in the course of the book. <br/> <br/>Overall, you could do much worse, but this isn't one of King's best. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/799080?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>