Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye.
If You Go by Alice Robinson
Why I have it: Popped up in my Goodreads feed.
Summary: When Esther wakes with a breathing tube down her throat, she has no idea where she is or how she got there. In terrible physical condition, Esther is tended to by Grace, the only other person in the building. Desperate to get back to her kids and suspicious of Grace, Esther takes drastic action to escape.
I’m thinking: No.
The Best Minds by Jonathan Rosen
Why I have it: listed multiple times on Best Book of 2023 lists.
Summary: Rosen’s investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved.
I’m thinking: Yes.
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Why I have it: mentioned by a colleague.
Summary: After a decade of stability, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply. Haidt examines the epidemic of teen mental illness and shows how the ‘play-based childhood’ that began to decline in the 1980s was finally wiped out by the arrival of the ‘phone-based childhood’ in the early 2010s – the result was a ‘rewiring of childhood’ which has interfered with children’s social and neurological development.
I’m thinking: No.
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I have just this very day abandoned If You Go, at page 63. I should say to balance that, that it has been very well reviewed and there are links to two favourable reviews on my review at Goodreads. (I don’t review books I don’t finish on the blog).
The idea of having someone wake up from cryogenic sleep is clever, but while she is recovering, she does a lot of moaning about motherhood, her failed marriage and her awful mother, and I lost interest in it. It may possibly appeal to younger readers experiencing the same issues but I found it tedious and depressing and her skilled writing was not enough to rescue it for me.
I got enough of the sense of the style from the sample chapter and decided it wasn’t for me (plus the slight suspense/thriller element in terms of her escape also isn’t really my thing).
It’s a pity because I have really liked her previous work.