Review: Sharp Objects

Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw the HBO miniseries and had to read the book.

Camille is a journalist who returns to her home town to report on a child murder, and a missing child. She has secrets, the town has secrets, and her home and family and the town is a freshly painted house that is rotten inside but darn, it looks good on the outside and isn't that what counts?

For the record, that always works better for me -- so I typically enjoy the book for the additional details, and can appreciate how the film/TV series interpreted the book. The other way around usually leaves me wondering about what was left out.

I appreciate how closely the miniseries followed the book; and also how certain background things were filled in, so that the watcher saw things earlier than the narrator in the book revealed them -- or, also, saw things that the narrator never saw or realized herself.

One thing I had difficulty with in both the book and the series is the timeline of it all. I'm a timeline person, and in both, Camille's own fractured telling, and her unreliable memories, make it a bit difficult to pinpoint when and where things in her past happened. But, I think it's on purpose, to keep things on edge and uncertain, and it's why the series used dreams and memories so much.






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