As some of you might remember from this post, I signed up to receive a preview copy of the book Away, by Amy Bloom from LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program. I thought the description looked promising, and I was looking forward to reading the book. I wish I could say glowing things about the book, but now that I’ve read a little over half of it, I’ve decided not to read anymore of it. I put it down four or five days ago in disgust and then picked it up again today thinking, “oh, it couldn’t have been that bad”. I quickly regretted my decision as the “accidental heroine” started to stumble into a three-some with the prostitute who picked her up out of the gutter and the prostitute’s pimp. It wasn’t so much that I objected to the sexual content of the book (although much of it seemed gratuitous, albeit not as graphic as it could have been) it was more that I objected to how the main character, Lillian, has no reaction to anything.

Lillian is not an “accidental heroine” as the blurb describes her, she’s sleepwalking through the book. Her only reaction to almost everything is numbness. Lillian does have a tragic past - losing her whole family, including her daughter (who later is supposed to have been saved and taken away from the village by another family), in a pogrom - and perhaps her attitude is supposed to show her absolute numbness to life because of past events. This does not make for much of a main character in this case, because there’s nothing compelling about someone who just stumbles from one odious situation to another with little to no reaction. Everything is ok with her, although ok is perhaps too strong of a word. Nothing is worth objecting to and everything is at least tolerable. I think the author was trying to show that she was willing to put up with anything in order to get her daughter back, but it isn’t very convincing. She doesn’t seem to have any thoughts of her own, any reactions to what is happening to her. She’s willing to put up with anything, but it doesn’t end up feeling like she’s willing to do this because she’s so focused on her daughter, but rather because she’s so two-dimensional she just doesn’t care about anything.

I’m trying to think if there was anything I liked about the book. The cover was nice (although I suppose the author has little say over that), the prose was decent enough, and I did like her technique for dismissing supporting characters from the stage. As a character was no longer needed, she would quickly sum up some “high” (really low) points of the character’s life and then move back to Lillian. It was sort of an interesting technique, and I rather liked how it tied off the characters when they were no longer needed. But as you can probably guess, I really don’t recommend wasting your money and particularly your time on this book.