#author: Wil Medearis

[darkwithasharpenededge]

Damn I Had Bad Luck With The Hardcovers I Bought At Goodwill: A review of Restoration Heights by Wil Medearis

DNF at page 97 (29%)

Summary: I bought this book because I thought the cover was pretty, which was, of course, my first mistake. I won't be giving a full review, because I didn't finish it, but I can tell you why I didn't finish it.

The plot really just didn't hold together at all for me. This main character, his name is Reddick or something stupid like that, runs into this girl in the alley behind his apartment. The next day while he's at work he finds out that she's missing, and her fiance's family refuses to investigate. His fiance's family's neighbor (yes really it's this stupid) asks him to investigate her disappearance on his own, strictly off the books. The guy has a million more productive things to do, but just can't let the idea that he was the last person to see her go, and he starts cooking up wild scenarios where she's dead. He breaks into her apartment. He gets accused of stalking. He gets told by literally everyone to stop investigating this. He keeps on going because the plot of the book demands that he keeps on going. Also the main character looks kind of like a picture of the author I saw when I was browsing, and based on the about the author section in the back, the main character lives the author's life with the addition of a missing girl. Ugh.

Final Verdict: The author really wanted to write about tension in the neighborhood he lives in, got reminded that he needed a plot, and squished together some kind of investigation mystery. The result is not great.

Review Word Count: 269

[biofunmy]

11 New Books We Recommend This Week

THE GIMMICKS, by Chris McCormick. (Harper, $27.99.) McCormick’s novel begins in the early 1970s, nearly 60 years after the Armenian genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire. The story follows two cousins in Soviet Armenia who consider themselves brothers: Ruben Petrosian, a promising backgammon player obsessed with politics, and Avo Gregoryan, a large, sweet teenager who eventually becomes a professional wrestler in the United States. “A thumbnail sketch inevitably makes this novel sound overcrowded and jumbled,” our reviewer John Williams writes, “but McCormick keeps things admirably nimble, moving the stories forward while shuttling back and forth through time and across perspectives.”

THE HEAP, by Sean Adams. (Morrow/HarperCollins, $26.99.) “The Heap” is about a pile of trash that used to be a tower. There is easy symbolism to be had in that contrast, but Adams is thankfully less interested in allegory than in cutting satire. What he’s really after, in this darkly comic narrative about the search for the collapse’s lone survivor, is an exploration of communal life. “The novel’s concern is not the instinct to form groups, but what people do within them,” Wil Medearis writes in his review. “The suggestion is of a lingering quality to human nature. Whether clustered in a vertical utopia or scavenging its collapse, people, for better or for worse — and in ‘The Heap’ it is frequently the latter — will always act like people.”

TRUMP AND HIS GENERALS: The Cost of Chaos, by Peter Bergen. (Penguin Press, $30.) As Bergen, the author of several books on national security, shows, Donald Trump’s relationship to the American military is fraught because he has no understanding of the martial virtues and seems to assume that soldiering is simply a matter of violence, even uncaged brutality. “It took a level-headed observer of no particular insight or special knowledge to understand that Donald Trump’s deficiencies of character, outlook and experience made him unfit for office,” Eliot A. Cohen writes in his review. “But ‘Trump and His Generals’ raises … important questions about the outlandish and sordid tale.”

10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS IN THIS STRANGE WORLD, by Elif Shafak. (Bloomsbury, $27.) At the opening of this atmospheric novel by Shafak, a prolific British-Turkish writer, the narrator, a prostitute, has been murdered and left in an Istanbul rubbish bin. In the minutes before her brain ceases to function, she recalls her eventful life in vivid, sensuous detail. “Who was she? Who’s killed her? Who will remember her after she’s gone? What will be the consequences of this brutality?” our reviewer, Julia Phillips, writes. “These are the questions the book takes up, with plenty of room for grief, humor and love in between.”

A DREAM COME TRUE: The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti. Translated by Katherine Silver. (Archipelago, paper, $26.) Admired by Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, Onetti, a Uruguayan who fled his country’s repressive regime in the 1970s, ushered Spanish-language fiction into the modern era. His surreal stories capture the anguish and thwarted dreams of people under dictatorship. “Listlessness is his great theme,” Ratik Asokan writes, reviewing the book, “and it gives his stories their unusual shape. Rather than dramatize events, Onetti shows people recalling and reflecting on the nonevents of their lives, or, more usually, the lives of others, trying to give them meaning and glamour.”

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