Wednesday, April 29, 2015

The Lifeboat -- Take 2

I finished The Lifeboat in short order.  (It's also a short book.)  It wasn't bad.

I am a fan of books with unreliable narrators.  As this book opens, our heroine is on trial for murder.  Whose murder?  Time will tell.  Grace narrates in a flashback, and you hear the story of her ill-fated trans-Atlantic voyage in the very early days of WWI.  She ends up in -- you guessed it -- a lifeboat with a few dozen others.

As the days pass, Grace's tales become a little bit less reliable.  People in the lifeboat start to die.  Do we believe her when she explains how and why?  I guess you'll have to read for yourself to find out.

I like that I don't really know if her recounting of events was accurate.  I dig that in a book (or movie).  (Related aside: I'm dying to read The Girl on the Train.)  It was a moderately engaging experience.  I think I just didn't like Grace's character all that much.  I found her mix of innocence and entitlement to be irritating.  Although I suppose, in a way, those are the very things that make her a type of narrator I enjoy.  It appears I have a dilemma.

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