kate

I would definitely listen to it again because I like a good story well told -- and that's what this is.

There's a funeral scene near the end where one character recalls her lost friend in better times, pushing back against systemic b.s. with sass and humor and guts. That recollection will stay with me.

No, but I intend to. he's very good.

Krystal. Because she's smart and gutsy and full of heart.

I glanced through the bad reviews before downloading this book and almost skipped it because they were so vehement. I'm so glad I didn't! This has nothing to do with HP; my advice is to think of this writer as someone you've never heard of and take the work on face value. It's a book filled with people most of us can recognize, some of them honorable, some of them wretched, some of them just lost. The prose is fine and the dialogue rings true.

For those who say it's all just ugliness and vulgarity, I strongly disagree. I love this book.

She's a very, very good writer with a detailed, disturbing, ultimately inspiring story to tell. What more do we need in a memoir? (She's obviously innocent; if people think otherwise they don't understand how impossible it would be for her to have killed her friend and left no DNA at the scene.) I've read some comments from people whose knowledge of what happened comes from tabloids, and I have to say I hope she's able to ignore them. Most of us would have collapsed under the weight of what she faced; she didn't.

Hats off to her parents and step-parents, too. The saddest part of this whole thing, for me, is her description of sitting in prison after three years, thinking about how isolated she was going to be from these people, even if she somehow got out and got home again. She knew there was always going to be a giant space between herself and others -- which is an insight anyone who's lived through a long trauma will recognize as the truth. She's an extraordinary person.

Jojo Moyes is a gifted writer; she has a good sense of story, writes fine dialogue, and knows how to use detail.

But she doesn't have any business distorting a world that millions of brave people live in every day for the sake of an imaginary and silly "hero." Knowing just barely enough to write coherently about spinal cord injury shouldn't be license to exploit other people, and that's what she's done. For some of us, this isn't fiction. It's not dramatic potential, it's life.