G.H. Eckel > Recent Status Updates

Incredibly good writing. Beautiful prose. And a quirky, interesting agoraphobe who shows us her twisted world through a window. It's clearly a repeat of Hitchcock's Rear Window but the execution and writing is first rate.

Rereading this novel to "get" Katniss' first person POV storytelling. I'm switching from third to first person POV in a similar novel I'm writing.

After a somewhat annoying attempt to make sure the author was writing down to teens, the novel is picking up with actual/real sharing between Aza and Davis and between Aza and Noah.

yeow! this is slow. A chapter about skinny dipping or not. A chapter about whether Isa should smoke a cigarette or not. I get it that this is a girls' reunion but the first 75 pages should be 30.

Nice writing.

Good but a bit long in the middle.

Scottoline is a great craftswoman with words. I'm impressed with her writing style. I'm not yet entirely drawn in by the conceit of the novel... a guy who gets fired because his wife's medical bills are too high, which would increase the money the company has to pay for insurance. It's totally real and yet not inspiring. Still, a good read so far.

Great concept, great beginning. Part way into the first quarter of the novel Sebold resorts to talking about events in a summary style, that doesn't work. She has the perfect authorial agent of an angel who is able to listen to everyone, the truly 3rd person omniscient narrator. It would have been more powerful just to let the angel be a fly on the wall and listen to what was going on in her dad's investigation, etc.

Some good, novel ideas here. A little too much repetition, i think to get a good page count, and ideas that are good in the abstract but hard to apply when writing. Still, it's interesting.

Another high testosterone thriller with Mitch Rapp and Irene Kennedy at the helm.