Book of The Month discussion
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The Shards
JANUARY 2023
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The Shards (add-on) : Discussion Thread
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re-starting, getting through the first 100 pages again, on audio
I respect you for pushing through. I received it as an ARC and never got through very much of it.
Amy wrote: "I respect you for pushing through. I received it as an ARC and never got through very much of it."Awe, thank you! and I'm sorry you didn't like it either! lol
Starting it now. Based on your comments, I'm starting it on audio.
oooh man. If you get into it and want to stop, I won't blame you at all!
Finished - A rarity just happened...I totally agree with your 1-star and I am also only giving it 1 because I wanted to DNF! That's honestly only the 3rd book I've ever felt like that before. I pushed through it for our HOB challenge...otherwise it was good bye! Close the book and never think about it again!(view spoiler)
Bret Easton Ellis's masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.
17-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret's obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling pre-occupation with The Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them--and Bret in particular--with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends--or his own mind--to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between The Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.
Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero LA, The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret's life at 17-sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best.