Claire > Recent Status Updates

Definitely a first novel. Whitehead is putting too much in this book. He is a good writer, but seems to need to prove it all the time. It’s exhausting.

“It’s as though an artillery shell has gone off, loaded not with gunpowder but despair and squalor.”

17 pages in and I’m loving it already.

Brower measures the height of a rapid using the water in his cup as a level. I call bullshit. He plays fast and loose with numbers and statistics.

Page 86 “when he reveals…that he has four children and lives in a redwood house. “We all make mistakes””

I wonder how his 4 children feel.

Page 86 Brower has no regard for training. Throws around “statistics” that have no basis.

Page 119 the protagonist “The more I read, the more unsettled I become.”

That sums up the way I’m feeling. I don’t like the cruelty mixed with sex and mental illness. I keep hoping for redemption of some characters and fearing the “good” ones will be revealed as monsters.

I like reading the texts between the investigators.

I don’t know which character will be the victim, but I sure know who I hope it is.

I’ve never read a book written in the way before. Reading the well wishing/condolence messages from each of the characters made me think, not for the first time, that it’s important to keep the focus on the patient and the family.

P 133

“What she tells him after that blows out the back of Chris’s head like a book-depository bullet.”

How long has Jordan Harper been holding onto that phrase? Clever, irreverent, and gross. I wonder what percentage of his readers make the connection.

I’m finally getting into this story. I think there was too much character development in the beginning. I would have suggested more in medias res and sprinkling in the character development.

Also it made no sense for Mae to think Dan was making a move on her.

P 31 find a lead steer meaning find a major news outlet, leak a story, and the other outlets will report it too.

Noir, gritty, a bit icky

Pg 162 “What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t dare think about it. Why do I have to think about it? I’m too old. Let the others take care of it.”

I feel this way sometimes. I kick myself for being a coward.

P 228&229 Steinbeck mistakenly says TX is the only state that can secede. This is not true. It cannot. https://www.tsl.texas.gov/exhibits/an...

Pg 205 reminds me of the changes in old town Newhall