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A review by elisability
La Vérité sur l'Affaire Harry Quebert by Joël Dicker
3.0
** Disclaimer: I read this in the original French. **
The narrator, Marcus Goldman, is a young author whose first book was a roaring success, and is now struggling to get started on a second one. He goes to Aurora, a small American town on the coast of the Atlantic, to find refuge with Harry Quebert, a celebrated author who was his professor years ago and has remained his friend since. While he’s there, he discovers that his mentor had an affair 33 years ago, when he was 34, with a 15-year-old girl, Nola Kellergan, who disappeared at the end of that summer.
A few months after that visit, Nola’s body is found on Harry’s property, and Harry is arrested and accused of murder. His reputation is dragged in the mud, but Marcus is convinced of his old professor’s innocence. He starts his own investigation, and soon receives threats, which only convince him that he’s right in his suspicion that the story is bigger.
So the book goes from Marcus in the present (2008) and Harry and Nola in 1975. It is part murder-mystery and part love story. To be honest, the love story part exasperated me–but I blame that in part on the writing. I keep making myself read books in French, and every time I conclude that I hate books written in French. I honestly think I wouldn’t have disliked it as much if I had read it in English (the dialogues would have been more believable, at the very least, I kept thinking, “but nobody actually talks like that!”).
Another thing I disliked was that every single character was despicable. Except for... nope. I actually didn’t like a single person.
My mom is the one who suggested this to me, and she said the ending had disappointed her, but for me, the ending is actually what pulled the book up from two to three stars. The solution to the murder mystery is not what you expect it to be, and that made it interesting to me. There was a lot more going on behind the scenes at that time than what we saw, and I liked how the clues were dispersed throughout the novel and all came together in the last few chapters.
The narrator, Marcus Goldman, is a young author whose first book was a roaring success, and is now struggling to get started on a second one. He goes to Aurora, a small American town on the coast of the Atlantic, to find refuge with Harry Quebert, a celebrated author who was his professor years ago and has remained his friend since. While he’s there, he discovers that his mentor had an affair 33 years ago, when he was 34, with a 15-year-old girl, Nola Kellergan, who disappeared at the end of that summer.
A few months after that visit, Nola’s body is found on Harry’s property, and Harry is arrested and accused of murder. His reputation is dragged in the mud, but Marcus is convinced of his old professor’s innocence. He starts his own investigation, and soon receives threats, which only convince him that he’s right in his suspicion that the story is bigger.
So the book goes from Marcus in the present (2008) and Harry and Nola in 1975. It is part murder-mystery and part love story. To be honest, the love story part exasperated me–but I blame that in part on the writing. I keep making myself read books in French, and every time I conclude that I hate books written in French. I honestly think I wouldn’t have disliked it as much if I had read it in English (the dialogues would have been more believable, at the very least, I kept thinking, “but nobody actually talks like that!”).
Another thing I disliked was that every single character was despicable. Except for... nope. I actually didn’t like a single person.
My mom is the one who suggested this to me, and she said the ending had disappointed her, but for me, the ending is actually what pulled the book up from two to three stars. The solution to the murder mystery is not what you expect it to be, and that made it interesting to me. There was a lot more going on behind the scenes at that time than what we saw, and I liked how the clues were dispersed throughout the novel and all came together in the last few chapters.