I had high hopes for this book when I first started it, but the longer I read it the less I was into it. I feel like I only continued to read it because there were some mildly interesting things going on and I just wanted to know if certain characters were going to be alive or dead at the end of the story.
The main characters of the story are wife and husband, Maddie and Nate, and their son, Oliver. Maddie is an artist, she creates sculptures from recycled materials, Nate is a cop, and Oliver is an overly sensitive teenager. At once, it is very obvious that Oliver’s immense empathy is going to be a major focal point in the novel. Also established early on is how Nate’s terrible relationship with his father is going to be very crucial to the story. Additionally, I got the sense very early on that there was something wrong with Maddie, mentally. The story is part mystery, part thriller, part supernatural.
Now let me just get straight into all the things I didn’t really like about this novel. There were several different plots going on at once and sometimes it was obvious that you were reading the main plot. Sometimes the author would tell you outright that you were in the past. And sometimes at some point you would figure out for yourself that you were reading a passage that was not happening in the present, and the main characters were not actually the people you were reading about on those pages. I don’t mind a story that jumps between past, present, and even future events, but what made me not enjoy this so much was the fact that sometimes we found ourselves in the past or present of other realities. And some of the realities were so similar that it made it hard to keep track of which passages were part of the reality that the main characters were in, and which ones were the side plots.
Sometimes, you would think you were reading from a certain character’s perspective only to find out that no, you weren’t. It really interrupted the flow of the story in my opinion. I found myself questioning what I was reading often, and not in a good way. I think I would have enjoyed the story a lot more if the author had picked one way to exercise our brains. I think the back and forth between past and present, this reality and that reality, and both of those elements combined, was what made me slowly lose interest. It wasn’t that bad for the entire book, it started to get more and more jumbled around in the second half of the novel. So, yeah, the first half of the book was pretty decent, then it got messy in the second half.
Then there is the title of this novel. I find that it makes you think that ‘the’ Book of Accidents is going to be important and prominent. But it isn’t. It plays a very small part in the overall plot of the book. I think the author could have come up with something better.
Finally, I’m just going to say it, I think the character Edmund Walker Reese was redundant. I think you could have taken that character out of the story and it would have been exactly the same. He wasn’t needed and he didn’t add anything to the story. The fate of Nate could have reached its conclusion in another way, he didn’t need to have that moment of redemption in order to go through that door.
I think this could have been a better story. I think the author got a little carried away. It’s like he wrote this book based on a bunch of different ideas that he had, and he couldn’t pick one so he just tried to write all of them into one story. I think that if he separated some of his ideas and organized them better he could have written two or three better novels utilizing different parts of this story. Edmund Walker Reese and his obsession with numbers and murder could have been one book on its own. I am actually disappointed that the story didn’t get into him very much at all. Jed, his alcoholism, how he went about researching and writing his novels, the tragedy with his family, that could have been a book. And then the main plot with Maddie, Nate, and Oliver could have been a separate book, if it were thought out better. So even though this book got great reviews, it is not something I would read again or recommend.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 