After Her -- Joyce Maynard

Let me save you some time. 

Rachel's father is a babe magnet. Her mother is a stick figure of a character. Rachel is late to puberty, and not popular.  She and a boy she doesn't even like engage in sexual play with one another awkwardly and often. She and her little sister like to play in the woods a lot, and generally just wait around for their father to show up so they can engage in some more hero worship while their mother dusts furniture or something. A serial killer is at work in their community, and her father is the detective who is very good at everything his job entails except catching serial killers.

That's what we learn, over and over, for about the first 200 pages.... at which point the story gets some wheels... right before it begins to spin them through a series of ridiculous red herrings, until it reaches its unbearably unsatisfying conclusion.

Not that I didn't like it or anything. 

Surly's Bottom Line:  You know a novel is tedious when you begin to wish the serial killer would shut the narrator up.



Publisher: William Morrow & Company
I read the ARC.
Publish Date: August 2013