A review by diannastarr
Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn

  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

When comparing Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl to Sharp Objects, this novel absolutely takes the cake.  When you first dive into it, it is such a seemingly simple premise: protagonist (Camille Preaker) is a journalist has to return to her small Missourian hometown to report on the grizzly murders of two adolescent girls.  You walk into the novel thinking that it is going to be just another crime story, just another tiny town novel in which it makes everyone has a secret and that something wicked lies beneath the surface.  All of this is true: and yet it is also not.  What Flynn has accomplished in these pages is a deep dive into violence.  Specifically: what happens when you put a child in a pressure-cooker like environment and brush everything under the rug.   The novel is disturbing in so many ways, simply because it illuminates acts of feminine violence, or violence that relates to and is inflicted by women, in such a graphic way that nobody wants to discuss, ranging from
Spoiler Joya peeling her daughter's sunscreen burns as an act of public humiliation to Adora's history with her mother and desperation for love manifesting itself by Munchausen by Proxy, and lastly between the two daughters: one who carves letters into her own skin, and the other who went so far as to rip out the teeth of her friends because they got more attention than her.
  Sharp Objects is a disturbing take on family dynamics - specifically among women - and while parts of it made me shudder, specifically the scene between Adora and Camille where
Spoiler Adora verbalized her desire to carve her own name into the one spot on her daughter's back that was bare
I could not put it down simply because deep down, I knew that there are sharp objects that lie within me.  It is a certain feminine rage that Flynn hones in on, a violence that isn't bullets in a chest or monologues dripping with a desire for vengeance.  This rage is a quiet one, something that simmers within and takes its outlet on one of two things: those around you, or you take it out on yourself.  Flynn has created a masterpiece with Sharp Objects and it is one that I cannot wait to read again and again.