In many ways it seems to be quite a traditionally structured romance: bad lad from the tough side of the tracks goes good to win the girl.
It's a beautifully balanced novel with the darkness of the central crime never forgotten or over-sweetened by the love story. What are his motivations? I was anxious to understand him, yet too much was left unexplored.īut this is Mikey and Ellie's book. He can be funny and loving in his sister's company. He's good-looking, relatively wealthy and intelligent. Similarly Tom, who is the most complex character here. We feel for Karyn, but we don't ever get to know her well. She is too often just out of the picture, cocooned in her bedroom or locked in the bathroom. Unfortunately Karyn's character, as the victim, doesn't feel as fully developed as her brother's. How should we view date rape? Who exactly is capable of rape?ĭownham highlights the fact that horrendous crimes have far-reaching consequences, affecting not only the victim and the accused but families, friends and society as a whole. In places the novel has all the intensity and pace of the best crime thrillers, as readers are forced to wrestle with the moral ambiguities right alongside the characters. Mikey and Ellie should hate each other they should share the bitterness and resentment that their respective families do. Ellie loves her brother, and of course wants to defend him. She only cried rape the next morning after sobering up and feeling embarrassed and snubbed when he no longer wanted her. Karyn was drunk, she offered it to him on a plate, he says. But the family's bubble of middle-class security is dramatically burst when Tom is accused of Karyn's rape. Ellie lives with her brother, Tom, and their parents behind an electronically locked gate.
0 kommentar(er)
