Book 64: Live to Tell

Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner was an interesting read. It was an interesting twist on the idea of a murder thriller and mental illness. The characters had rich back stories.

This was a great little book. The perfect companion on a commute. It had action and great characters. The downside, it could be a choppy read.

I love how this book dealt with issues you don’t always think about. First, what it is like to be the one to survive the deaths of your whole family and you were witness to the onslaught. Second, how draining and difficult it can be to raise a young kid with severe mental illness. I learned a lot especially in how pediatric psych units can be run. There are some really interesting therapies out there and it’s neat to see how things are changing. The idea of CPS is really interesting and just plain smart if you have the ability to learn more about mental illness.

I liked the three main characters and the variety of lesser characters. There was Danielle, the lone survivor who was both the psych nurse and the struggle of dealing with a big anniversary of the death of the whole family. DD is the strong women detective who wanted to get a little personal time and yet dedicated to the job. Victoria the mother who gave up everything to care for her son who would bounce from being loving to absolutely psychotic.  All these characters had real breath to them. They weren’t perfect and they had issues.

The action always kept a good pace. Each chapter really had a purpose and would trade points of view so you could really get into the minds of the three characters. So many people died in the space of four days. There were two families killed (5 and 6 people respectively) and a primal girl. It was getting pretty crazy.

I hated how the book could get really choppy. While I love good plot progression, every so often I was lost.. Things would happen in the white space and you almost needed that information. While it was good to work my comprehension and logic skills.

The other thing that I disliked was the ending. I won’t go into too much detail, it was pretty lame. The Andrew Lightfoot character just fell apart in such an unbelievable way. I just couldn’t get behind that collapse. While the change in Evan’s character made sense, the change in Andrew Lightfoot’s didn’t.