15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Devoured this Book, May 17, 2009
This review is from: The Last Bridge: A Novel (Hardcover)
This book was nearly impossible to put down. I was hooked from the first sentence and never looked back. The premise is a young woman, Cat, who comes back to hometown after her mother commits suicide. Cat had left home ten years prior after having severed all contact with her parents. When she returns she is wasted, both literally and figuratively.
As Cat begins to investigate the circumstances surrounding her mother's suicide and attempts to interpret a cryptic note her mother left for her, her memories of her family and how they coped with a horrifically abusive father begin to surface in spite of her attempts to numb herself with alcohol. "He is not who you think he is," is all she has to go on to put the pieces of her shattered life back together.
The story alternates between Cat's memories, beginning in childhood, and the present until the two connect. Along the way, her relationship with her siblings, her parents, and her first love are revealed in all of their complexity. At many points in time you are left wondering who is villian or hero at any given point, including Cat herself. This is a psychological thriller/mystery at it's best. At the end of each chapter you want more, until suddenly you find yourself at the end of the book.
I appreciated that this book was fast-paced, and yet the characters were very well drawn. On the book cover, this author is compared to Jodi Picoult, but in fact, I found it better than the last few Picoults I've read. Picoult has a tendency to sacrifice character development for the sake of creating suspense in the storyline, but that is not the case with The Last Bridge. Another difference is the lack of a legal/trial component.
I gave the book 4 1/2 stars not because I thought the writing was so superior, but just because it is so rare that a book hooks me so deeply that it is almost unbearable to stop reading it until I find out what happens next.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well written, but dark tale, June 28, 2009
This review is from: The Last Bridge: A Novel (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"The Last Bridge" is not an easy book to read. In fact, I started several weeks ago and put it down. This novel which dealt with issues of alcoholism, domestic violence and physical and sexual abuse was too dark for me initially. But then I picked it up again and found it to be an interesting and fast read.
Kat is a twenty seven year old drunk. She has been running from her past for the last 10 years. She has cut off all contact with her family and lives a marginal existence whose only highlight is a bottle of Jack Daniels. Out of the blue, she gets the call that her mother has committed suicide. "The Last Bridge" is about Kat's journey to her hometown to face the demons that she tried to leave behind.
Kat isn't a heroine that is easy to like. She is extremely damaged. She is self destructive and more than a little rough around the edges. As a reader, you understand why she is the way she is, but that doesn't make it any easier to read. Most of the book dealt with Kat's rediscovery of herself and whether or not she was going to continue to run from the past.
There are a lot of family secrets in this book. In the hands of most authors they would have turned this book into a bad soap opera. But oddly enough, Terri Coyne weaved them so well into the story that they were not overly dramatic or just cheap gimmicks.
The supporting cast of family, friends and old lovers were well drawn. No one is perfect in this tale. Those imperfections gave this book a level of grit and depth that was needed in order for it to succeed. The setting was detailed and suitably bleak. The fact that this tale occurs in winter, when everything is buried under blankets of ice and snow (just like our heroine) was appropriate.
"The Last Bridge" is a portrait of a broken a fractured family, that deals with the power of forgiveness and redemption. It isn't the kind of book that I would read again, because the subject matter was so dark, but it was well done.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Big story potential lost in emotionless, uncompellling delivery., June 5, 2009
This review is from: The Last Bridge: A Novel (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I really wanted to like this book. It started off with a bang (literally) and a bit of a mystery, and although I finished the book with a small feeling of reassurance, overall I found the writing to be pedestrian and the character development wanting.
Spoilers ahead so beware, but I'll try to keep them to a minimum...
The story focuses around Cat, the alcoholic victim of an abusive father and a generally loveless family. The story is written in the first person from Cat's perspective and generally alternates between current-day events and flashbacks to her past, which fill in many of the blanks in Cat's self-destructive behavior. In the opening pages we learn that Cat ran away from her family ten years ago and only returns to help take care of affairs when when a family friend tells her that her father had a debilitating stroke and her mother committed suicide, the latter leaving a mysteriously vague note addressed specifically to Cat.
The rest of the book largely develops around Cat's convoluted family tree and their emotional relationships. Everyone in the family has at least one secret. Some, like Cat's alcoholism, are more obvious than others and through the pages we learn those secrets and how they affected other people and at times other people's secrets. The story culminates with a more-or-less happy ending, which is to say that there's a general feeling of optimism in the final pages which wasn't there in the beginning.
That being said, I agree with several other reviewers here and with Karie Hoskins' review in specific: "It never felt like I was reading about people...it felt like I was reading a plot that the author, Teri Coyne, stuck people in." (Karie, sorry for copying your line but it's 100% accurate of how I feel about this book too.) There are scenes within this book which should be personally and emotionally distressing to the reader. There are events which occur which should make the reader wince or just want to put the book down and walk away for awhile. But this never happens.
The book reads like a cross between a police report and an unauthorized biography being read by the subject of the bio. The characters never seem to exhibit any real emotional impact, and there's not nearly enough character development to make you wonder why. Cat does a fair share of crying in this book, but it's all presented in a very matter-of-fact way which leaves the reader wondering if it's worth caring about the character at all.
An example: I was reading a passage in the book where, from my perspective, Cat is having a disagreement with another character as they trade lines back and forth. Several lines into this dialog Cat says something, and Coyne writes that Cat is shouting. At no point prior to this was there any indication that Cat was anything beyond annoyed at the person she was talking to, but it turns out Cat wasn't talking to anyone, she was angrily shouting. There's no indication ANYWHERE that this was happening until after it happened, and even then the fact is delivered in such an emotionally sterile manner that you find yourself completely ambivalent to Cat's emotional state. Worse, as the dispute-cum-argument cools down, there's no description of the emotional state of anyone involved, leading the reader to wonder what, if any, affect it will have on the characters in the book.
Another example: At one point in the book Cat's father tackles her, rapes her, then passes out on top of her. Cat crawls out from underneath him and drags herself under a bush to recover. In what is possibly one of the most understated events of the book, Cat then discovers that her leg was broken and that must have been what the cracking sound she heard was. Then, as quickly as the subject arose, it was dismissed just as quickly. I actually had to go back and reread the section, thinking I had missed the actual event of her leg breaking, but it turns out I didn't miss anything. It just wasn't there.
And that's the fundamental problem with most of this book. It is loaded with traumatic events - rape, brutal attacks, alcoholic stupors, abandonment, lies and more - but they're presented in such a matter-of-fact way that it's impossible to connect or sympathize with any of the characters. At times it's like reading a police or coroner's report. A coroner performing an autopsy lacks an emotional connection to his subject, and his report reflects that. This book reads in much the same way. There's no emotional involvement. "Just the facts, ma'am."
The book is an extremely easy read. It took less than four hours of casual reading spread over three days to finish it from cover to cover. Although I never found myself forcing myself to continue reading, I also never found myself utterly compelled to find out what happened next. At times I found myself reading the book and thinking it would be a decent screenplay, perhaps living actors could invoke the emotional attachment that the author failed to invoke. There is definitely potential here and I would like to see that potential explored, but I don't think the author has the tools or technique to fully evoke that potential.
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Many people ask me how I went from doing stand-up comedy to writing a dark debut novel. For me, writing fiction is a lot like doing comedy. In comedy, the truth is hidden in the humor, like a pill ground up and mixed into a spoonful of jelly. It’s there, but you don’t feel it right away. In fiction, the story does the same thing. Characters can say and do what you cannot (or would rather not) do. In essence they are the “jelly.”
