Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I picked this book up for a couple of reasons – and none of them appear to have been the right reasons.
The setting of this book is the area where I currently live. Descriptions of places are easy for me to picture. Things like the Market Street Bridge can be seen from my office on a daily basis. That was not nearly enough to make me enjoy the book more.
My first issue was the writing style itself. It was an odd sort of future reminiscence – almost as if somebody on the other side of this unholy disaster was looking back fondly at a time during the disaster itself. The author often skipped from current time line to flash back in the middle of a chapter because the narrator was describing things nobody in the scene could possibly have known. It was distracting and constantly kept me out of the flow of the book.
The flow… seemed to just wind along with the river and not actually go anywhere despite journeying all the way up the Susquehanna to New York. I struggled to care about any of the characters and related to none of them.
On the plus side, I did actually finish the book. The story does seem to conclude, but I couldn’t bring myself to get excited about it. I’d have trouble recommending this one.