A touching tale about a man who lost the will to live, but gradually grained the will again. Wesley is a depressed, twice divorced prison guard with two children he barely sees. He's only just making ends meet and feels like everyone else is better off than him, so separates himself from his friends and society. And yet there is hope for the future in he most surprising of ways.
This is a very different read for me. Honestly I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. I requested it because I thought it looked like a black humour read and I was interested in something a little lighter than the thrillers I usually read. This definitely fit that bill.
The way it's written is interesting; it's very crude, with talk about porn and masturbation and drugs. It all goes into vivid details and is very blunt in it's portrayal. I'm not sure whether I enjoyed this aspect or not. Sometimes when reading what's written my eyes sort of widen in surprise, and sometimes it has me chuckling to myself because of the dark humour within. This book is definitely for adults only.
Instead of building up slowly to the big turnaround at the end, it seems that the first 2/3 of the book are depressed Wesley, complaining about anything and everything, and then suddenly everything is fine again and he's not depressed anymore and whatnot. It seems like everything just turns around with little to no explanation at all.
Despite its flaws, however, I found this book a very interesting read. It caught my attention and had me giggling to myself in quite a few places. I learnt to feel for Wesley and I believe Armacost built up the character development well. I liked that I didn't quite know what was going to happen or who was going to end up with who. It was a very unique read and I appreciate the fact that Armacost has written something that has never been done before.
There were a few grammatical errors, and some tense issues that bothered me. For example, the past tense of "drag" is not "drug", it's "dragged". These are just some minor issues, and since my copy was before it was proofread and edited I hold out hope that these grammatical errors are going to be fixed before publication. Just a few little niggling errors that I saw.
Overall, this was an interesting book and the author's voice is once I haven't ever read before; however there were some faults with the novel as previously mentioned. That is why I gave this book 3 stars overall. Armacost has potential to be a wonderful author, and I'm intrigued to see some more books from him. I believe I'll be watching closely and picking up his other works when they appear.
A very interesting take on life, and a unique voice. 3 stars.
* This book was sent to me for free through the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I was half-tempted by this on Net Galley, but didn't request partly because I've too many books already. Still kind of interested but your lukewarm response doesn't have me flying back to Net Galley to request. Cheers
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