Saturday, May 21, 2011

CBR III #4 - Beginner's Greek by James Collins

Beginner's Greek was a fairly easy novel to whip through.  The pacing of the plot kept me turning the pages long after I should have been asleep each night.  Despite enjoying the book and finding it hard to  put down, I was not terribly invested in the two main characters.  I found them likeable at first, but then partway through, I found I couldn't care less whether they found what they were looking for or achieved a happy ending.  Neither of the main characters, Peter or Holly, seemed to have grown from when the  reader meets them in the first pages to ten years later.  In fact, they seemed to almost become less well-rounded and become more two-dimensional.  Holly seemed to only function as a jawline with reddish hair and Peter was a caricature of a semi-reluctant corporate climber.  The narrator explains to the reader that they are both good and interesting people, but nothing the narrator describes them doing is either particularly good or interesting.
The character who held my interest the most was Holly's stepmother Julia.  She had a few sections devoted solely to her character about halfway through the book and I was a little disappointed when the book flipped back to the Holly, Peter and Charlotte triangle.  She was more well-rounded and without resorting to just explaining how good and interesting she was, the narrator actually gave her a back story and thoughts that showed her to be an interesting; and the background of her past, less than good, deeds made it all the more compelling when she actually struggled with a decision and ended up making a more morally decent choice.

No comments:

Post a Comment