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A review by isabellesbooks
The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan
2.0
I loved Brain on Fire, but this one... not so much. What pulled me in beyond Cahalan and her firsthand experience with mental instability was the premise of the study this book is supposed to be about.
I know the author is a journalist, which should have been my first clue that the style of this book isn’t my cup of tea. Rather than presenting solid facts in a single timeline, we follow Cahalan on her journey to find information, which I wasn’t very interested in. We meet those she meets and learn the information that she gathered as well as how she gathered it. I would have loved this if it was presented as more of a story without all the “behind the scenes” details. The journalistic style of this book reminds me of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I did enjoy more.
Another thing worth noting is that this book is, in a way, all over the place. When we meet someone who needs to tell us information about the study, we learn their entire backstory, which leads to another backstory, which leads to... so on and so forth. I simply didn’t care about a lot of the content and was just waiting to hear about Rosenhan’s study, which way more of the book could have been dedicated to.
I know the author is a journalist, which should have been my first clue that the style of this book isn’t my cup of tea. Rather than presenting solid facts in a single timeline, we follow Cahalan on her journey to find information, which I wasn’t very interested in. We meet those she meets and learn the information that she gathered as well as how she gathered it. I would have loved this if it was presented as more of a story without all the “behind the scenes” details. The journalistic style of this book reminds me of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which I did enjoy more.
Another thing worth noting is that this book is, in a way, all over the place. When we meet someone who needs to tell us information about the study, we learn their entire backstory, which leads to another backstory, which leads to... so on and so forth. I simply didn’t care about a lot of the content and was just waiting to hear about Rosenhan’s study, which way more of the book could have been dedicated to.