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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN num: 9780307341556
ISBN number: 0307341550
Label: Three Rivers Press
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 272
Printing Date: July 31, 2007
Publishing house: Three Rivers Press
Release Date: July 31, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 25629
Studio: Three Rivers Press
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Product Description:
WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart
Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker’s troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille’s very first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.
NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her leg
Since she left town eight years ago, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town. Now, installed again in her family’s Victorian mansion, Camille is haunted by the childhood tragedy she has spent her whole life trying to cut from her memory.
HARMFUL on her wrist, WHORE on her ankle
As Camille works to uncover the truth about these violent crimes, she finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly. Clues keep leading to dead ends, forcing Camille to unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past to get at the story. Dogged by her own demons, Camille will have to confront what happened to her years before if she wants to survive this homecoming.
With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.
From the Hardcover edition.
Amazon.com Review:
As loyal Entertainment Weekly subscribers, we have been fans of Gillian Flynn for her smart, funny, and spot-on reviews of books, movies, and TV, but we were not prepared for her stunning debut novel Sharp Objects, a wickedly dark thriller that Stephen King calls a 'relentlessly creepy family saga' and an 'admirably nasty piece of work.' We're calling it a cross between Twin Peaks and Secretary--sinister, sexy, and stylish. Perfect fall reading. --Daphne Durham
10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Gillian Flynn
Q: Do you prefer writing novels or reviewing?
A: I think writing is more pure--and actually a bit easier for me. It's just me and my laptop, not me and my laptop and a TV show that 30 people have worked on. Reviewing keeps you sharp--I can hardly watch or read anything without taking notes now--but plain old writing I find actually relaxing.
Q: Do think your writing is influenced more by books that you have read, or shows/movies that you have seen?
A: My mom spent her career as a reading teacher and my dad is a retired film professor, so I was really steeped in both books and movies growing up. To this day, when I get my dad on the phone, pretty much his very first sentence is 'Seen anything good lately?' I love putting words together (I've never met a simile I didn't like), but when I write I often think in 'scenes'--I want these two people, in a dirty bar, with this song playing in the background.
Q: I hear you are working on your second book...is it is too early to ask what it's about?
A: I'm still playing around with the whole plot--when I wrote Sharp Objects, I wasn't even sure who the killer was for a bit. But I can say [the new book] has to do with family loyalty, false memories, a wrenching murder trial, and a dash of good 'ole 1980s hair metal and devil worship.
Q: What is your writing process like? Have you changed anything about how you work since your very first book?
A: My writing process is incredibly inefficient, and hasn't changed between books. I really don't outline: I know basically how I want the story to start, and vaguely how I want it to end (though like I said, with Sharp Objects even that changed!). Then I just write: Some characters I start finding more interesting, some less. I write entire swaths that I pretty much know I'll cut. I have an entire file of 'deleted scenes.' I guess the one thing that has physically changed is I moved into a new place since my very first book--it has a great bathtub, and I'll prop my laptop up and write in the bath for hours. Which is, admittedly, weird.
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers 
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The book is short but I struggled to finish it, and I'm an avid reader. The ending was really not all that surprising. Also, the character development felt forced and unnatural. I would not recommend this book.
Rated by buyers -
Have to agree with a lot of the other reviewers that it was difficult to believe this was a very first novel. The writing was wonderfully vivid and dead-on, and the characters, believable and haunting. I was sucked right into the story from page one, and though I'm normally not drawn to such dark topics, I couldn't put it down. Ms. Flynn isn't afraid to show the uglier sides of life in a way that makes you at once repulsed and sympathetic. With "Sharp Objects" she has written an incredibly perceptive book and I can't wait to read her others!
Rated by buyers 
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This debut novel is articulately written. Bordering on the bizarre and grotesquely unbelievable, this novel examines one of the most dysfunctional 'Mommy Dearest' families ever to hit the written page. The novel's genre is hard to describe. It is part thriller, part psychological mystery, partly a drama about family dysfunction, part murder mystery and partly a drama/memoir of the impacts of abuse.
The protagonist has a history of self-mutilation, cutting herself so badly that there are no areas on her body except for her face and hands that she can't leave uncovered if she wants to hide her secret. She has to wear turtlenecks, long sleeve shirts, pants, etc. From a clinical perspective, a cutter is someone who suffers excruciating emotional pain that is persistent, hard to identify, and takes up all of a person's consciousness. Usually, cutters have a history of abuse/trauma in their own backgrounds. Cutting, as a metaphorical blood-letting, causes pain in a specific place and allows the pain to be isolated to one part of the body. As the blood flows, the pain goes. In theory, once the blood is let, the pain identified and the intensity of the pain decreased, one is better able to function. However, cutting is not a good coping mechanism because the true source of the pain is not addressed, self-mutilation creates it's own shame-based symptoms, and cutting becomes a form of self-medication rather than treatment for root causes. Cutting is a short-term coping mechanism for a deep-rooted and serious underlying pathology.
The protagonist of this page-turning novel is a journalist who returns home after many years with no contact with her mother and step-father. From the tim she enters the house, the reader has goose bumps because of the creepiness and fear-factor that the house and its inhabitants radiate. She notices that her younger sister is sexually promiscuous and using a lot of drugs. This reminds her of her own sexual promiscuity and drug use when she was an adolescent. She decides to investigate and find out what is lying in the dank underbelly of her familial home.
There is an abundant sense of creepiness about many of the characters. However, no character is fully fleshed out. The narrative is interesting and the writing is good, but there are too many odds and ends in the narrative that dead-end or are not followed through with. Because I liked the book and it had so much potential, I wanted to know more of the 'who, what and why'.
I recommend buying this book or taking it our of the library because despite criticisms, it is a good book. Once the author gets her phenomenal gift for writing congruent with a well-told tale and flushed out characters, there could be some great surprises in store!
Rated by buyers 
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I hate to give this book a bad review but to me this book is too dark and too weird. The story being about a little girl killed and one gone missing should have given me a clue. Mysteries are my favorite but this just wasn't my cup of tea!
Rated by buyers 
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This is an extremely well-written and forceful book, especially for a very first novel. There's nothing remotely tentative about this story of Chicago reporter Camille Preaker's return to her little southeast Missouri hometown to do a story on the murder of two local young girls less than a year apart. It may be the work of a serial killer and the local head cop is out of his depth, so they've called in a homicide specialist from Kansas City. But the murder investigation is only part of the story. More mesmerizing, and a good deal creepier, is Camille's re-examination of her own family, which brings new meaning to the description "dysfunctional." Camille's younger sister, Marian, died two decades ago at about the same age as the recently murdered girls, having been "cared for" by Adora, their vampiric mother. Then, a few years later, Adora had another daughter, Camille's half-sister, Amma, who, at thirteen, is extraordinarily pretty, precociously sexual, and who bosses the clique that runs the school with calculated cruelty. She's very much her mother's daughter. Stephen King, not noted for gushing endorsements of other people's work, comments on the jacket that the effect of the narration is cumulative, and that's exactly right. As you move farther and farther into this horror, you dread what you know is probably coming, but you're unable to look away, to stop reading. Flynn's style is both unadorned and exquisitely sharp. The former comes out in Camille's matter-of-fact description of her own pathology: She's a "cutter," having spent most of her life incising words into her body with knives and razors, cultivating the scars until she dare not wear anything but long sleeves and pants legs. The latter is demonstrated by the fact that this book just leaps with sly, quotable lines: "It was a natural gift for Adora, making other women feel incidental."
A visiting cop "peeled the label of the empty beer bottle subsequent to him and smoothed it out onto the table. Messy. A sure sign he'd never worked in a bar."
In describing the way her mother manipulates everyone, Camille relates how the death of her little sister was so useful in that regard. No matter what anyone said, "my mother would not be distracted from her grief. To this day it remains a hobby."
Or, "Reporters are like vampires. They can't come into your house without your invitation, but once they're there, you won't get them out till they've sucked you dry."
Or, "`So hard to get good help these days,' she muttered earnestly, unaware no one really says that who's not on TV."
Or, "Like all rural towns, Wind Gap has an obsession with machinery. Most homes own a car and a half for every occupant (the half being an antique collectible, or an old piece of crap on blocks, depending on the income bracket)."
One of my favorites, in describing an acquaintance's rather bland husband: "He was good-looking if you looked at him long enough."
Flynn also has the knack of setting an entire mood by describing a single detail. For example, the little town of Wind Gap snaps into focus when Camille notes that she found the police chief "banging the dent out of a stop sign at the corner of Second and Ely, a few blocks from the police station." Or, of a group of 13-year-old girls passing around a bottle of rum: "The rim of the bottle was ringed with pink lip gloss."
Damn, that's good stuff.
This is one of those books you'll keep thinking about for months. Flynn is definitely going on my list of new authors to watch.
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