The Likeness by Tana French

[lightreads]

The Likeness by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Well.

Follows In the Woods. Cassie walks out of the wreckage and into a new case which sends her undercover to infiltrate the tight-knit household of a murdered girl. This is very much like In the Woods, and I'm not talking about the need to suspend one's disbelief on the premise. Both of these books are post facto first person memoirs of travail and inevitable destruction; they both examine the forging and breaking of human connections; they are both intricately written and occasionally overwritten, with a core of twisty psychological intensity.

This one didn't work on me as well as In the Woods. Partly because all the thematic underpinnings here on the creation of group identities and the struggle for happiness in the modern world just didn't interest me as much. And partly because I'm onto French now, and I was never all that impressed with her more gothic flourishings. I sighed tiredly when this book did an actual "When I dream of Whitethorne House…." Sequence.

But. All that said. There is so much to unpick from French's convolutions and turnings. And every few pages something would flash out at me, aimed just right. "I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack." Oh, Cassie, I know who you are thinking of.

At the bottom of it all, French is a tremendous craftsman, and my dissatisfaction with this book comes from my conviction that it retreads too much stylistic ground, that she has something more daring and different in her, and that I want it.




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