Book: Life Before Her Eyes

Posted on | December 15, 2007 | Comments Off

This was my second attempt to read this book. That sentence alone should give you an idea of what I’ll say about this book. The last time I tried to read this book I got about 30 pages in and was so not interested that I put it away. That was a LONG time ago.

This time around I decided I was just going to read it if only to get it off my “to be read” list (I’m sick of seeing that cover pop up in my LibraryThing widget in the sidebar).

From Amazon.com’s description of the book:

This…novel…opens with a shocking scene from a Columbine-like school massacre. Diana and her best friend are confronted by a schoolmate killer, but only Diana is spared. Fast-forward 20 years: Diana, now middle-aged and still beautiful, is a housewife and artist living in the same idyllic university town with a handsome professor-husband and a young daughter. She has seemingly repressed her memory of the event as well as her survivor’s guilt, but her perfect world and her grip on reality are both starting to crack.

Interesting premise, right? It’s the reason why I picked up the book in the first place. So I started reading it again this week and made it past the first 30 pages and by page 60 I was into it. But then towards the end I found myself losing interest. While the writing itself was very lyrical, it was also very repetitive. Single scenes that should have been accomplished in 10 pages took 15. This increased as the book went on – scenes that should have been shortened took so long I began to skip whole paragraphs knowing I had already read enough to know what was going on. By the time I got to the last few pages of the book, I just didn’t care enough about the character – both the teenager facing a loaded gun, or the middle-aged woman looking for her daughter at the zoo.

I hope you don’t have to read this book for book club. If you do, I feel for you. The good thing? It’s a relatively short book compared to a lot of choices book clubs make.

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