Tuesday, July 31, 2012

The Grove - John Rector

Date Started: 7/30/12
Date Finished: 7/31/12

Ok, it's confession time. I started this blog to keep track of the books that I've read. The great thing about the blog is that it really does help me keep track of all of the books I've read, and remember more details about them than I otherwise would. The bad thing is that I can now compare how many books I've read year to year. And what I realized this month was that I am pretty far behind where I was last year. Not that it is some kind of competition with myself, but still. I think it's because of the Russian literature I started the year off with, but who knows. The Paris Reviews have also been quite long. In any case, I wanted a book I could get through quickly and based on the amazon reviews, this one looked like it fit the bill. So chalk another one up for July.


Alright, so the story is about Dexter, who finds a body in a grove on his property and doesn't know if he killed the person (a 16 year old girl as it happens, whose name is Jessica). Dexter had a tragic, violent past, wherein he murdered a guy and was then forced into shock therapy and on pills the rest of his life (I think the author alludes to the fact that he killed the guy to avenge his wife, Liz, getting raped, but I wasn't 100% sure). Dexter and Liz are happy with their daughter Clara, but then Clara is killed by a hit-and-run driver and their marriage collapses. All of this happens before the start of the story and we learn about it through Dexter's memories.

So the whole story is basically Dexter's descent into insanity as he tries to determine who killed Jessica (kind of - he doesn't really do much in this regard). Otherwise he just goes crazy and has essentially a relationship with Jessica's ghost (who wants him to kill everyone to keep "their secret"). The reader is left wondering if he did it but I wasn't shocked when it turned out that he didn't. Anticlimactic story ending - she died of a drug overdose and her friends confess after Dexter tries to kill himself (and shoots his friend Greg in the process; both live).

This was a quick read that fit what I was looking for in the moment, though it was almost laughable going from Game of Thrones to this story, just in how differently written the stories were.

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