Thursday, November 06, 2014

The Divorce Papers: A Book Review



Page 38. That is as far as I could go. And that after starting over twice from the beginning.

I received a copy of THE DIVORCE PAPERS through a Blogging For Books arrangement with the publisher and I felt a certain level of responsibility to get through the novel. It is so bad that I just couldn't do it.

The novel is marketed as a modernized version of the good old epistolary novel, so what make it modern? Oh look, there are no letters but there are e-mails and notes and see the cute graphics to make it look like real letterhead or someone's handwriting. Is it an epistolary novel that ran through a graphic novel and came out the worse for the encounter?

The so-called plot, if it can be found in this mash-up, is supposed to concern a criminal defense attorney thrown into a divorce case. Other than that, I neither know nor care about the rest of the cast. It is not worth the amount of work needed to find the narrative arc when the author throws in duplicates of genuine legal documents because, well, she's a lawyer and not just playing one on television.

Sometimes you wonder how something got published. I suspect that author Susan Rieger either has a good friend in high places at Broadway Books, or she has some serious dirt on an influential editor.

I cannot recommend this book to anyone. 

 

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