The Forgotten Seamstress

指輪物語の2巻、「二つの塔」を読む予定が、ちょっと横道にそれて全く別の小説を読んでしまいました。一日で読みきったから今はちゃんと「二つの塔」に取り掛かっております。
もう毎日仕事で脳みそ沸騰中なので読書以外はする気なしなのね。

So I have joined the book club, virtually.

Collette Pattern has started an online book club and announced the first book a while ago. Like I mentioned last, I needed some push to read broader range of books so I thought it would be a good opportunity to keep up with the book club, not that I would ever participate in online discussion on their website.

So the first book was Liz Trenow's The Forgotten Seamstress. It has a flare of mystery solving aspect to an inter-winding two life stories. Since I was so mentally exhausted from work and wanted to do nothing but reading, I spent a whole day reading it last weekend.

I enjoyed reading it but at the end, it was too Lifetime movie like, and the over dramatic story felt rather cheap.

The book begins with a PhD student interviewing a former mental institution patient in the 70's, and the former patient's telling of her story 50 years ago.

The story, for that interview part, is told as a first-person perspective, basically a transcript of an interview, and I just do not like that style. I read plenty deposition transcripts all the time and it's actually interesting to read because it's a two-way conversation (unless the person stutters too much or use "you know what I mean" or "like" in every single sentence), but this one person talking pages after pages is painful to read.

I tried to read Wold War Z  before, which is entirely an oral history of zombie war told by different people, and I spent 3 years reading bit by bit and lost interest. My point is, one person's conversational talk is not pleasant to read if it's too long. Because people just don't talk 5 minutes straight without the other person interjecting some response, unless it's a speech. You tried to be "real" by transcribing the conversational language, but it's just so fake.

In The Forgotten Seamstress, thankfully, also has a second story line, which actually is the main story line, that is written in a normal first person view and set in 2008. That was a relief.

As I mentioned, the story is a bit too much Lifetime movie, so that was unfortunate. But it was fun reading a light novel, I needed it.