Monday, March 24, 2014

Book Review: Identical


Realistic, scary, and surprising.
The author once again manages to make real characters, with real problems.  She tackles an immensely difficult topic – incest.  Hopkins manages to show the horror, the guilt, the causes and effects of incest in a very real and very appropriate way.  She is able to describe the terror of a daughter who fears her father’s drunken state, because that is when he comes for her.
Hopkins describes it without being graphic, without being gratuitous and gross.  She is able to give you that queasy feeling and make you uncomfortable without stepping over that line into disgusting description and voyeurism. 
She handles the topic accurately, and shows what happens as a result of sexual abuse – from the eating disorders to the cutting to the drug use etc.

This book is much like Crank and Glass and all the others.  It is terrifying not because of shock value, but rather because it is realistic.

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