The Answers
Catherine Lacey
Mary suffers from unexplained body pains. Left in pain with no money, no hope and no answers (haha), she’s willing to try anything. Her oldest friend in the world suggests a pricy wholistic treatment – and the first session seems to help. But Mary is going to need to finance it somehow – she’s going to be the Emotional Girlfriend.
I’m really frustrated by this book because it started off quite promisingly with a woman that is suffering from unexplained body pain, who then was able to recover by using this special psychic therapy. Which of course manipulates her emotions, and her practitioner’s emotions, lining her up perfectly to be the…
EMOTIONAL GIRLFRIEND for self-suffering, stuck up jerk of an actor who thinks that he can change the outlines of love. What starts out as an experiment as far as she knows sort of goes more weirdly the further along you get. I was reading along very happily because they hadn’t fallen in love yet (my partner pointed out this has two hearts on the cover, one of red and one of blue) and it didn’t seem to be another irritating straight romance. Since there were lots of girlfriends and the blurb said things about unexpected relationships developing, I got excited! Then clearly nothing happened: basically she didn’t fall for the guy which was AMAZING, but then it’s all the scientists’ fault they were manipulating them. I basically want to give away the whole story because otherwise, like me, you will read two thirds of it and then say “Wow I wasted a lot of time reading that, when nothing has actually happened!”
I didn’t actually feel a connection with any of the characters. I hated the main actor character which may have been because he was a man. But perhaps I was supposed to hate him… or maybe it was because I just never emotionally connected with any of the characters. This was due to a number of factors, including jumping around between perspectives; a bit of the main character’s perspective, then a bit of each side character acting. These characters weren’t even 2D, the other girlfriends weren’t important and they were just distractions. That space could have been used to resolve Mary’s whole complicated emotional background about being an orphan, but instead the read is left drifting along aimlessly.
I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t recommend it and all I can think of is that maybe this is written so that people who have read The Secret can say “Oh look, perfect, this book says it has The Answers”. Maybe if they were suckers enough to get into The Secret then they might be suckers enough to enjoy this novel. I didn’t. I finished it, but it was a struggle and I freely admit I speed read the last couple pages. I wish I hadn’t wasted my precious reading time on it. 1 begrudging star.
Allen & Unwin | 28th June 2017 | AU $27.99 | paperback
