utter randomonium

Blue Springs by Peter Rennebohm: The year is 1955, and 11-year-old Charlie has problems. His father’s a drunk (which for some reason takes multiple chapters and three separate incidents to get across; I get it, move on), so he runs away. Though the full title is “Blue Springs: A Suspense Novel,” there isn’t a whole lot of suspense. Some unbelievable bad guys chase after Charlie, but it’s so obvious that all the good guys will emerge without a scratch that there’s never any real tension. And the difference between good guys and bad guys is incredibly easy to spot. The characters are better described as caricatures, as everyone is either 100% good or 100% evil. To make matters worse, grammatical and typographical errors abound, distracting from the flow of the story.

To be fair, had there been no advertisement for suspense I may have felt somewhat more charitable. There’s no excuse for the repeated punctuation abuse and overall sloppy writing, but as a family drama this plot just might work. I still would not have liked it – I don’t watch made-for-TV movies on the Hallmark Channel either, after all – but my expectations would have been more realistic. The back cover is filled with good reviews so clearly there is an audience for this book somewhere. I just don’t happen to be part of it.

Also posted on BookCrossing.