I can only give this book two checkmarks. It's rare for me to even finish a book I don't really care for, and I'm not sure why I finished this one. I did scramble through the last 15% of it, that's for sure.
I read Davis' The Stubborn Season a few years back and thoroughly enjoyed it because it explored a mother-daughter relationship and was set in Toronto, so I had no qualms about downloading her second one, which I hadn't even heard about. According to its cover, the book was named "one of the very best books of 2011" by the Globe and Mail. Oh well...
The story revolves around an extremely dysfunctional family up in the mountains and the attitudes of the people in the village nearby. But I found the drugs, abuse, incest of the Erskines gratuitously presented, and I didn't feel it was well-written. At one point, because the sentences were so short and unevenly phrased, I thought maybe it was a young adult book, but the language ( at least one "fucking" per page) convinced me it was just not well-done. Maybe she was having trouble meeting a publisher's deadlines.
Too bad - I was looking forward to reading her latest, "The Empty Room"!
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