Ohio

This book changed my brain chemistry. As someone who grew up in a small town and moved to another small town in Northeast Ohio, the depictions of all the people and places mentioned were spot on. The drama is so real and unfortunately believable. The characters are complex, lovable at some times and hatable at others. It was easy to think of who I knew in high school and compare them to each of the high schoolers in the book. I could read another 500 pages about Bill. Vivid depictions of war, violence, trauma, sexual assault, and self harm, but that's life.

I really wanted to like it, literary fiction about the midwest! Where I'm from! The corrections is maybe my favorite book! But something about the writing in this book rubbed me the wrong way. It just feels too try-hardy. And while sometimes the characters and situations feel real, it also feels like he relies too much on cliche, the characters caricatures. But I also blasted through it so I obviously didn't completely hate it. Some moments were beautiful.

This is probably one of the worst books I have read in a long time. I can't believe I finished it. This book is the reason why I don't generally enjoy women characters written by men. The women here were given the same amount of page time, but they were here mostly for the men in the book to abuse or to fulfill the hot lesbian roles. They were not fleshed out characters, though to be fair, neither were the male characters.

I had zero sympathy for any of the characters. And holy crap, Bill's section was THE WORST. Page after page of nonsensical political bull that is 15 years too late was torture.

This was supposed to be a mystery and a book about a town hit hard by opiates, the war and the recession. I think they mention the recession twice and he says everyone does drugs. War does play prominently, but why? Nothing about this book makes sense to me. The only thing that was glaringly obvious was that there really wasn't a much of a mystery and that Markley spent so much time waxing not poetically about politics that he didn't have time to build any sort of mystery. The murders were an afterthought so that what? He could put this in the mystery genre? So disappointing.