Rating: 
Summary: Ultimately a very disappointing novel
Review: This was a page-turner, as they say. The first half was particularly compelling, although you quickly got the sense that here was a popular entertainment with high-philosophy pretensions that it couldn't quite handle the weight of. The other extremely irritating thing about the novel was the unconvincing efforts of the author to get inside the heads of her many supporting characters. The voice of the main character, the accident-damaged ex-model Charlotte Swenson, was pitch-perfect; this is probably because it was an extension of the author herself. But everyone else, with the possible exception of Charlotte's childhood friend Ellen Metcalf, was off-pitch in one way or another. The world of the other Charlotte, Ellen's seventeen-year-old daughter, was hilariously off-base. What current-day teenagers, even white ones living in Rockford, IL, use words like "dire," "egregious," and "peachy"? There were two black characters, a gay modeling agent and a straight homeless man. Both spoke in voices inauthentic to the cultures they were supposed to represent. The character of the identity-shifting Lebanese terrorist Aziz (and the foggy examination of his motivations) was even more unconvincing; the other male characters were made of cardboard or else too vaguely developed to stick with you. (There was also a paragraph about the World Trade Center that seemed almost flippant after the events of 2001.) On the other hand, the plot was intriguing enough that you wanted to get to the end of the book, no matter how poorly it moved in the second half. But the ending was flat and seemed tacked-on. It sure didn't resolve any of the stories of the characters who weren't the protagonist.
| 
