Amy Brashear

The only thing The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction has going for it is the nostalgia factor it evokes with its setting and with the protagonist that carefully annotates all cultural references she makes in her journal. Anyone who grew up in the eighties and nineties will enjoy the clothes, the food, the attitudes towards everything. You will remember the duck and cover drills and may even think about your own fear about nuclear holocaust during the height of the Cold War. I enjoyed those parts of the story, even as it brought back some long-forgotten concerns of World War III and mutually assured destruction. That is where my enjoyment ends, however. The remainder of the story is too flippant for pleasure, mocking the movie industry and the fallout of having a movie made in your hometown. It tends to lighten the genuine threat of atomic warfare that was that era through poorly concealed jokes and way too much gallows humor. It is not even well-written enough to allow you to forgive some of its faults. I muddled through to the end because I was mildly curious to find out how it ended, and I am glad that I was able to assuage my curiosity to that end. I don’t regret reading it, but I do wish it had been better than it was.… (altro)

“People always think highly of the dead when they’re dead. It’s definitely not how they thought of them when they were alive.”

[b:No Saints in Kansas|24975002|No Saints in Kansas|Amy Brashear|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1487265150s/24975002.jpg|44640229] is a reimagining of Truman Capote’s [b:In Cold Blood|168642|In Cold Blood|Truman Capote|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1424931136s/168642.jpg|1940709]. We follow Carly Flemming as she and the town come to grips with the grisly murders of the Clutter family and trying to find out what happened and why.

Things I Liked:
This book had really short chapters, which I always love. They let me really get into the story quickly and fly through it.

I like that when we started off the murders have already occurred. This helps us get right into the action and hook us in the beginning. I thought the beginning of the story was strong.

The writing feels emotional and reactionary to events happening. It’s easy to connect with and it draws you in!


Things I Didn’t Like:
The characters are introduced with little backstory and discussed like we already know them. We get some info on them but I always felt a little lost when we met a new character. And the information we get is from tangent backstories, like their first meeting or something else that is trivial.

Carly wasn’t the smartest when looking into the murders. She constantly made bad decision after bad decision. She was often assisted by Mary Claire and Landry and then abandoned by them. It became a repetitive cycle of doing something stupid then being ignored, making up, and repeat.

Along with bad decisions, Carly was pretty unlikeable to me. She constantly make the murders about herself and her relationship to Nancy. She was upset that everyone else was talking to Truman Capote and she hadn’t got to tell her story. When she does meet with him, she’s upset he doesn’t really care about her.

I felt like the ending was unsatisfying. Everything came together quickly and neatly. There wasn’t much tension, besides the petty high school drama, even though Carly and her family was ostracized by the town and physically and verbally threatened.

This book was ok, but largely forgettable. I liked where the story started and the intrigue of the murders in the quiet, unassuming town, but I wanted more character development, more tension, more sleuthing. This book had a lot of potential and is a really quick read, but it’s not really one that will stay with you.

I received a copy of the book from the Soho Press via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.… (altro)

I found the character of Carly entirely too impulsive to be very likable and her "investigation" of the murders might have been more believable if she had been an adult but a 16 year old was just too much. I really liked the way that the author incorporated Truman Copote into the fabric of the story. Although this is billed as a "young adult" novel, anyone with an interest in the Clutter murders or small town life will find this novel appealing. Carly is of course, a fictional character,but most of the other characters and situations are based on the actual murders that Truman Copote wrote about in his book [In Cold Blood].… (altro)