The Authenticity Project - 2 stars

[forsanolim]

A motley cast of characters is brought together through a notebook in which they share their secrets: Julian, a lonely old man, writes his story before passing it along to Monica, owner of a barely-solvent cafe. When she reads his story, along with his challenge to write her own and leave the book for someone else to find, she decides to help him and also to pass along her own story, leading to chains of friendship and more.

This was... not excellent. I had reasonably high hopes for this book, but it really didn't work for me. From the outset, the writing style really didn't work for me--it was really cliched and simile-laden (in one five-page span right near the beginning of the book, for example, I found such similes as "her face went tight and red, like a human version of the angry-face emoji," "strung between the two, like a row of pearls, but without the sheen, were twenty-five huts," and "he'd been carving a tally [each day] on the wooden base of his bed, like a prisoner of Alcatraz rather than a tourist in one of the most beautiful corners of the earth."). I very nearly gave up twice, once near the beginning of the book and once about halfway through, but I persisted hoping that the plot would carry the book, and because I wanted to like some of the characters.

But speaking of cliches, the plot and characters also felt pretty cliched. The plot had virtually zero suspense, and I guessed many of the plot points in advance; which might have been fine, but there was such a frustratingly little amount of unexpected complexity in the book's characters. I phrase it this way because major focus of this book--as one can guess from the title, so I don't feel that this is a spoiler--is the sort of disconnect between surface and reality in what we see in people. Sure, this is a great message, but wow was this repeatedly hammered home. One particular character, in particular, is essentially a caricature in this regard--from basically the first page that the character appears on, this contrast is comically obvious, and there's no further depth, really, that's ever revealed. Also related to this point, this book also uses an absurd amount of dramatic irony in that characters constantly mis-judge each other's motives and views.

Overall, ugh. I made it through, but I don't think it was really worth it for me.