Scan barcode
A review by alexisrt
A Good Man by Ani Katz
4.0
Thomas Martin is a successful ad executive with a pretty wife, a daughter he loves, and a nice house on Long Island. Sounds great, right? Well, we know from the outset that it doesn't end well.
The initial setup of the book doesn't leave too much of a mystery: Something tragic happens to Thomas' family--and since it's a first person crime/thriller, you know the narrator can't be completely relied upon. That doesn't seem to be a huge recipe for success, or at the very least seems like it will be a retread, but Ani Katz generally makes it work.
It's a short book, a little over 200 pages, so it moves fairly briskly; I finished it in an evening. Although the general trajectory is predictable, Katz writes it well enough to keep you hooked and make you unsure exactly how and when things will happen. Although you know that Thomas has to be an unreliable narrator, he isn't a consistently unreliable one: you don't know how his self-perception is divorced from reality, and the degree isn't consistent. He seems to have been happily married, a good employee, a loving father, and there's independent evidence of that, such as promotions at work.
And yet, the seeds of toxic masculinity are there--the odd descriptions of the women in his life, referring to his wife and daughter as his "girls", his family history. The brevity of the book means that some aspects are only sketched out or hinted at, and character development was part of the fun for me.
(As a Long Island native I have a soft spot for books set there and particularly enjoyed the unnamed shout-out to the Walt Whitman Mall, where I spent so many hours as a teenager.)
The initial setup of the book doesn't leave too much of a mystery: Something tragic happens to Thomas' family--and since it's a first person crime/thriller, you know the narrator can't be completely relied upon. That doesn't seem to be a huge recipe for success, or at the very least seems like it will be a retread, but Ani Katz generally makes it work.
It's a short book, a little over 200 pages, so it moves fairly briskly; I finished it in an evening. Although the general trajectory is predictable, Katz writes it well enough to keep you hooked and make you unsure exactly how and when things will happen. Although you know that Thomas has to be an unreliable narrator, he isn't a consistently unreliable one: you don't know how his self-perception is divorced from reality, and the degree isn't consistent. He seems to have been happily married, a good employee, a loving father, and there's independent evidence of that, such as promotions at work.
And yet, the seeds of toxic masculinity are there--the odd descriptions of the women in his life, referring to his wife and daughter as his "girls", his family history. The brevity of the book means that some aspects are only sketched out or hinted at, and character development was part of the fun for me.
(As a Long Island native I have a soft spot for books set there and particularly enjoyed the unnamed shout-out to the Walt Whitman Mall, where I spent so many hours as a teenager.)