I am pretty sure that faking one’s own death does not happen
nearly as often in real life as it does in novels. Like amnesia, I find it to be sort of a cheap
plot device for allowing a character to gain a whole new identity. Anyway, here we have a teenage girl, Jane,
who lives off the grid with her father.
She is so isolated from the outside world and so dependent on her father
for everything that she apparently has a case of Stockholm Syndrome, in that
she is complicit in her own captivity.
However, when she discovers that he has been lying to her about a number
of things, she plans her getaway, but her
naïveté makes her escape quite precarious. To me, this is more of an adventure novel
than a thriller, and the plot is completely preposterous. Still, it’s an enjoyable read as long as you
are not expecting a literary masterpiece.
Jane is a fairly engaging protagonist, as long as you can buy into her blind
fealty to her paranoid anarchist of a father, and I had a significant problem with
that. Her judgment is tainted by her
father’s disdain for technology and authority, but her moral compass is intact,
sort of. And the behavior of her
supposedly dead mother is just off-the-charts weird. She takes the cake in the self-preservation department.
No comments:
Post a Comment