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Jaclyn’s Review: The Half-Life of Remorse by Grant Jarrett
The Half-Life of Remorse
written by Grant Jarrett
published by SparkPress, 2017
find it here: (affiliate links) Barnes & Noble, Amazon, iBooks, Book Depository, Goodreads
Disclosure: I received a complimentary copy of this book as part of the 2017 Summer Reading Challenge hosted by BookSparks.
Did I enjoy this book? My goodness this one was hard to read. The blurb on the back of the book was SO interesting! I was really excited to start this one . . . and then I opened it. The beginning of this book was SO SLOW, and it had absolutely NO PLOT. At one point, I actually stopped and did the math–then I told myself that if a plot didn’t appear after I’d read 25% of the book, I would have to put it down. The plot showed up 1 page shy of 25% (whew!). There are a lot of things that the author got right with this book: the story is told through multiple character viewpoints (you know how much I love this!); the writing is actually very good–word selection, sentence structure, etc; the ending is PERFECT. There are a lot of things that aren’t so good too: why did it take so long to get to the plot? The first 25% didn’t add anything of value to the book. The first chapter was flat-out confusing. The behavior of the characters was pretty unrealistic. It was hard to focus on what time period the book was set in (is it present day? 1970? It was hard to tell.). Overall, I’m glad I finished it–but oof, it was through determination.
Would I recommend it? Honestly, probably not. The ending was definitely worth the effort to get there, but there are a lot of good books out there that don’t require such determination and still have a good ending.
About the book – from Goodreads: When two vagrants meet on the streets of Muncie, Indiana, they are both unaware that their paths crossed years before. Chic, crude and uneducated, is convinced that Sam is nothing more than a harmless lunatic, and Sam, emotionally scarred and psychologically traumatized by events long past, regards Chic as just another denizen of the street. But Chic has spent his adult life trying to purge his soul of the brutal crime he committed as a teenager―the same botched burglary that resulted in the deaths of Sam’s wife and son. Meanwhile, Sam’s daughter Claire is still unable to give up hope that her father might someday reappear. When these three lives converge, the puzzle of the past gradually falls together, but redemption commands a high price, and what is revealed will test the limits of love and challenge the human capacity for forgiveness.
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