My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

 

I heard one of the women complain about her kids, and then say something like “but what is a home without children?” And uninvited, I answered, “quiet.”

 

He made a joke about how people with toddlers refer to them in months, and stated that if they’re over a year old, you can just say “a year,” not fifteen months. They’re not aged cheese.

 

I think of the Barbie graveyard we had in the garden where we’d buried fourteen Barbie dolls, in all, after Biff Larson’s dog next door chewed up their heads. Each doll had its own name and gravestone, and each had a proper funeral with personalized eulogies.

 

But it’s all the postmortem depression, that’s what the doctors say. Well, not a doctor, but her cousin Angie who want to be a nurse. It’s real shit though. I looked it up. After chicks have babies and stuff.

My Review:

 

I struggled with this one and waffled in how to rate this perplexing and engrossing tale. I marveled at the clever plot, the sustained and steadily ratcheting level of tension, the intrigue, peril, twists and turns, witty snark, and unexpectedly amusing observations. But damn, I had trouble even halfway liking the main character of Faith. I felt so badly for her struggle, but I wasn’t drawn to Faith as I found her to be annoyingly self-involved and making extremely poor decisions and idiotically abusing substances, all of which didn’t jive with her training and experience as a popular and highly successful psychologist.

Faith was impulsive, causing calamity, and making a mess of everything she touched. I surprised she didn’t have alcohol poisoning with the vast amounts she was tossing down. I had nearly lost all patience with her once she had begun spiraling out of control and losing touch with reality, but the compounding and confounding intrigue were just too good to give up. I was hopelessly ensnared, on the hook, deeply invested, and grinding my teeth for fear parts of this elaborate and multi-layered mystery would never be solved.

It was ingeniously clever, maddeningly paced, and tantalized me with misdirections, red herrings, and false assumptions. Everyone seemed to be suspect at one time or another and I would never have come up with this ending. Sigh, I’ll need a spa day, a crate of Moscato, and a stack of rom/coms to recover from this one. Seraphina Nova Glass (love that name) is a wily minx.