too jumpy

The Red House by Mark Haddon
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: I know that it's a perfectly valid literary technique to write in fragments rather than full sentences.  I know that frequent jumps from one character's perspective to another is also quite acceptable.  But I find books that do either too much, let alone both, very hard to read.  And yes, Haddon employs both techniques throughout this book.  So you may take my less-than-positive feelings about this book with a grain of salt, but there it is.

That being said, Haddon definitely made the right choice to write this book from the perspective of all the characters.  If he had tried to write it from the perspective of a single character there would have been no there there.  But the perspective changes so quickly (in some cases a character has only a single paragraph) and with only an extra line space between shifts that it can be kind of dizzying.  Unfortunately, it was very hard for me to enjoy this jumpy narrative.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.