Welcome Back!
My reading has been in the slumps lately. I have been book hopping from book to book like no other. I just cannot find on that will keep my interest, though I have managed to finish two quick reads.
The first book I read was Harlan Coben’s Home.
This is the 11-12th book in the Myron Boulton series. Oops. Didn’t know that. So, I would highly suggest that you read the other books in the series to enjoy Home. A friend read it, who follows the series, and said it was like catching up with old friends and he really loved the book. I, on the other hand, thought the book told a lot about these “old friends” that I really had no interest in, because I didn’t know their back stories. If you follow the series, my understanding is that you will enjoy this story. If you do not follow the series, I would skip this one until reading the others in the series.
The next book I finished was
You Will Know Me
by Megan Abbott
Wow. This book is disturbing on many different levels.
Devon Knox is a gymnast, a good one. Her dream is the Olympics, and her parents make it theirs, too — practices and equipment and a second mortgage to pay for it all. And then, the handsome boyfriend of her coach’s niece, who always helped around the gym, holding doors for the moms, digging retainers out of the foam pit, is killed in a hit-and-run. Devon’s mom Katie, who narrates most of the book, begins to take a harder look at her family: Her blank-eyed daughter, 4’10” and muscled with legs like the trunks of trees. Her overworked husband, who does everything for Devon, for her chance at the Olympics.
abbot thrusts the reader into a full immersion into this world, and it is incredibly effective. the book is primarily delivered through katie’s perspective, so it’s technically an outsider’s experience, but she’s supplanted so much of her own life to focus on devon’s career, she’s as tunnel-visioned as devon, and the scene where she goes to devon’s school and sees her, for the first time in ages, among regular teens instead of other gymnasts, is shockingly powerful.
The theme about greatness requiring great sacrifices and the question about should those sacrifices be made at any cost is explored in this book, which at times I found disturbing. Devon might be able to do something that very few can, but does that mean she should have had to give up a normal childhood and teenage experiences? Devon is at the gym as much a possible. She doesn’t have “normal” relationships, nor does she do “normal” teenage things…but, she is following her dream or is it the dream of everyone around her? I found myself thinking she didn’t even know how to act in teenage situations. How will this effect her future life?
Is she doing this because it’s her dream or because so many adults around her have their own reasons for wanting her to succeed? It is insane about what the adults around her do and act so they can “help” Devon get to the Olympics. They spend money on the gym, which I saw as buying a piece of Devon. One mom decides that Devon should switch gyms and takes her to a different gym, because she paid for the new pit in the gym. If Devon wins, they can have the best coaches, the best facilities…so about them and not Devon.
Should the Knoxes have dedicated so much of themselves towards a single goal of one child, or does a parent of a kid with an extraordinary talent have a responsibility to do anything to see it fulfilled? I think Katie, the mother of Devon, knows this is all insane and not “normal” for lack of a better word. But, just think of all the amazing things that will happen if Devon makes it to the Olympics…for her, her family and Oh! Devon, too. And by the way, Devon has a brother Drew that has grown up in the gym. What “normal” childhood does Drew have?
So, not only is this book a murder mystery, but also brings up lots of questions about the length that parents go to keep the dream of their child alive or is it the dream of their own they are keeping alive?
The beginning of this book is slow, but hang in there, it does start to twist and turn. I would give this book 3.5 stars.