Sharp Objects: A major HBO & Sky Atlantic Limited Series starring Amy Adams, from the director of BIG LITTLE LIES, Jean-Marc Vallée

One of my favorite shows and obviously the book is even better. Y’all need to read it !

This is an extremely dark book where the main character is a psychological mess who has recently checked out of a mental hospital and is struggling to cope with life while reporting on several child murders in her small Missouri hometown. The struggling Chicago paper she works for has sprung for one day at a hotel after which she must stay with her deeply troubled family. As the story unfolds, she has to deal with memories of her own miserable childhood, while addressing ongoing problems with her mother and younger sister. She is also continuously tempted to carve words on her own flesh, which is central to her psychological disorder and has already rendered her body hideous. As the story moves forward, the reader suspects the worst and when you get there the author gives you both barrels. This book is suspenseful and powerful, but it is not for everyone, and I think I will stay away from this author for a while. I still have to sleep at night and get up in the morning.

Just when you think you have it all figured out, wham! You don't. I didn't see it coming. Amazing writing keeps you hooked from page 1. Gillian Flynn knows her stuff, I am a big fan and this will not disappoint. I loved Gone Girl and was so happy when they made it a movie. I am very excited to see the adaptation of Sharp Objects on HBO. I could not put this book down. It's one of those books where you have to force yourself to stop reading so you don't read it in 24 hours. I tried to take my time but only lasted 4 days. If you are a fan of thrillers with great plot twists, you will not be disappointed.

I was looking so forward to reading this book, as it came highly recommended by several people. I was disappointed from beginning to end. The characters are not just unlikeable, they are so off-the-wall disgusting and bizarre that they became two-dimensional for me. Even the murder victims are impossible to pity, as they are terrible people as well.The sentence structure was also so atrocious, it distracted from the plot itself. I'm not sure there are more than five complete sentences in the entire book. I read Gone Girl, and I don't remember the sentence structure being such an issue in that book, which leads me to believe that Gillian Flynn chose to write Sharp Objects in mostly fragments, maybe to symbolize the fragmentation that is Camille's life (or all of these character's lives?). At any rate, it didn't work at all!I would not recommend this book to anyone. Maybe the HBO show is better.

Sharp Objects written by Gillian Flynn published in 2006 is a psychological thriller about Camille Preaker, a Chicago-based reporter sent to her hometown in Wind Gap, Missouri to cover a story about the unsolved murder of a girl whose chase bears striking similarities with a murder a year earlier.I heard about this book when HBO started advertising their 8-part mini-series starring Amy Adams based on the book. I’m a fan of Amy Adams, so I wanted to watch it, but before watching it, I thought I’d read the rather short (less than 300 pages) book. Apparently this was the author’s first published novel. She is probably more famously known for writing Gone Girl which was made into a popular 2014 big screen movie.Sharp Objects is a twisted psychological thriller. There is a lot of getting into Camille’s (messed up) head. The story is more about her and her relationships with her mother and half-sister than it is about the girls’ murders. This story is fraught with all sorts of aberrant behavior: sex with teenagers, drug use, alcoholism, bullying, self-mutilation, child abuse, and murder.Throughout the story, Camille battles with her past and her inner mind to keep from succumbing to the vortex of despair brought on by being in the sphere of influence of her deranged mother.At first, I had a tough time reading and understanding the author’s writing style. Don’t use this text to teach proper English grammar! Once I grew accustomed to that style, the story was strangely gripping. Camille clearly has deep psychological problems. She is sucked into engaging in dangerous behaviors during her visit to Wind Gap.As a psychological thriller, there isn’t much action and there is not much to the core story. Most of the interest is generated by learning about Camille and watching her get caught in the whirlpool of buried emotions that swell as she relives her childhood. It’s torturous to watch Camille endure things that would send me screaming back to Chicagothat’. Instead, she sticks to it until she finds the real killer and reconciles with her past.The author does an excellent job of describing the setting and the characters. One noticeable writing characteristic is that she uses “like” (as in simile) in practically every other paragraph which, on the one hand, provides a way to poetically describe something and on the other hand, is annoyingly repetitious.One brief comment about the TV series (since this blog post is a book review, not a TV review). My suggestion is to either watch the TV series OR read the book; not both.

I’m not the type of person who thinks that protagonists have to be likable, if anything there are far too many heroes in literature. However, I feel like the author worked really hard to make her characters “edgy” and gritty. There was no internal consistency to the dismaying details of the main character, Camille. For example, she would randomly observe that some child she came across in her old town was ugly or stupid or bound to have a depressing future. There was no justifiable reason for these observations, other than perhaps that the main character was a condescending snob? Despite the fact that we were supposed to find her sympathetic? I did like the plot, just not the overly done “dark” characters. I think the book is overrated.