Paint It Black: A Novel by Janet Fitch
|
List Price: Our Price: $4.91 You Save: $9.08 (65%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Paint It Black: A Novel
Book Review: Intriguing
Summary: 4 Stars
I really enjoyed this book. Sure, it's not the happiest book I've ever read, but I could not put it down. The author writes with tremendous artistry, and I felt as if each sentence pulled me toward the next. I found myself not even caring how the story ends, but just enjoying the ride and dreading reaching the last page. This novel is not about humor, mystery, story, or even characters but rather words, textures, sounds, colors, light, and pure emotion.Book Review: Great book
Summary: 4 Stars
very good story and Fitch's words are so amazing that i can really visualize the story in my mind (which is what a great book should do huh!?). what i mean is there's no struggling, at least for me, to get a clear picture of the situation, characters, etc.
definitely a dark book, but a great one.
Book Review: Good Book!
Summary: 4 Stars
Janet Fitch's new book was a great read. It got slow in the middle but never got boring. I also read White Oleander another work of art. I can't wait for more novels by her!Book Review: Ummmm...
Summary: 3 Stars
I read White Oleander after I saw the film and fell in love with it. I adored Janet Fitch's ability to turn the English language into something more fluid. She made it an art of taking simple words and making them flow together. Not only that, but she had a great story to tell, something that had never been done before. I expected the same thing to happen in Paint It Black. I was somewhat disappointed. Her writing style remains the same,however, where White Oleander had action, dialogue, and great interactions between the characters, Paint It Black focused on a woman's depression. I lost interest towards the end, and it was mainly for one reason: I had no connection to the dead boyfriend. It's really difficult to write a novel based on a character's feelings for someone who has passed. Novels such as these consist mostly of flash backs, or begin the story while that character is still alive. The reader did not know Michael, the reader did not care about Michael. In fact, I disliked him. Most of the flashbacks showed that he was cruel to Josie and ignored her for periods of time. A key factor in telling a good story is to show not tell. Yes, the reader knew that Josie loved Michael, but why? All Fitch showed the reader were flashbacks of Michael giving Josie the cold shoulder. The only time the romance between Josie and Michael were mentioned were in Josie's musings which is TELLING the reader what happened. FItch would have been better off if she simply cut out the meredith and josie bonding time and began the story earlier. Had she shown Michael and Josie together, happy, and then showed his slow descent into depression, then the suicide, and then the aftermath, without the horridly boring dribble on Jeremy's film and Meredith's crankiness, this would have been an amazing novel. But you cannot write a novel on the aftermath of a death, when the reader has no connection, and does not care, about the deceased character.Book Review: OK story, but overall too wordy
Summary: 3 Stars
The premise of this story is dark and depressing - its about the emotional rollercoaster of Josie Tyrell, after she finds out her boyfriend committed suicide. There was a lot of good stuff here - I thought Josie's character was great, I loved the moody pretentious mother Meredith, even Josie's bitchy friend Pen and the german girl Wilma I loved. Josie's way of dealing with her grief is through drinking, drugs and smoking cigarettes. I found the riff between Josie and Meredith very interesting, and I thought Michael was depicted as an intelligent, interesting character. I loved how poetry and art was interwoven throughout the story.
My biggest problem with this book is that a lot of the actual "story" was lost in Fitch's long, overly wordy sentences. Yes, Fitch has a gift for description, and can even beautifully describe a garbage truck...but she would go on and on for paragraphs and pages describing the smallest detail - after a while I would forget what she was talking abuot and have to flip back to remind myself what was actually going on in the story. Not every memory, every surface, every object and every person needed one hundred adjectives and metaphors to describe what they looked like and smelled like. It was a bit overdone.
I also thought the ending was abrupt. Josie goes on for hundreds of pages about her grief and anger regarding her boyfriend's suicide...then she meets a strange girl in need of a friend and poof! the story ends, leading you to belive this is a new beginning for josie?? After all that babble for pages and pages, HERE is where some extra description would have been nice!