The Maid's Version

Told in a scattershot way, with multiple characters across generations, the novel is not as compelling as it could be. Still, Woodrell demonstrates his mastery throughout. I would have liked it if it his editor would have inserted a few more commas.

You might think this short book would be an easy read. But I just kept waiting for it to end. I think someone died a couple times. There was such a mix of characters and none of them were well defined. There was an explosion and the maid slept with the boss and there was a sister and blah blah blah.

This was not a linear narrative. It was all over the place and we got to hear from a bunch of chatacters. It was really emotional to hear about all the people that died. I had resigned myself to not knowing what really happened because it was so all over the place, but I was pleasantly surprised that we did find out what happened in the last chapter. I had a hard time connecting with the chatacters. I'm not sure if it was the number of them or the non linear nature of the story, but it felt a bit like reading a newspaper instead of hearing someone's story. The plot was good, really good. That will stick with me even if the chatacters won't.

Book was interesting up until about 3/4 way thru. I had to struggle too much to keep track of the jumpy storylines.