Tara Deal

If you're the sort of person who likes most of the short stories in The New Yorker, then you'll probably like this book. It concerns a young couple, Scott and Kate, who vacation on a tropical island. Throughout the book, Scott subtly (perhaps unconsciously) tortures Kate. I read the book straight through, hoping Kate would somehow escape. But this is an existentialist book - the depressing sort of existentialism that recognizes no joy in either the small or the large things of life - so everything ends up pretty much as it began, with no lessons learned nor wonders appreciated.

A minor annoyance is that the book does not set spoken dialogue in quotations marks, which I found distracting.

I suspect there are readers out there who will love this book, but I am not one of them. It wasn't a waste of time, but it's not worth reading more than once.… (más)