Sunday, August 7, 2016

The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

I have this thing where I have a hard time giving up on a book I'm not enjoying. I have only done it a few times in my life and every time I do it, I feel like a quitter. I feel like the book has got to get better. Sometimes my perseverance pays off, sometimes it doesn't.

I have been reading this book since about March. It was a selection for my book club and I just couldn't get into it. When the meeting came and went (and I was still stuck in chapter 5) I set the book aside to focus on the next month's selection. And then the next month's and on we go. But this summer I was determined to finish this book. Thanks to our train ride to Toronto, I was able to finally finish it. It wasn't worth it.

I don't have a lot to say about the book. I found it confusing and boring. I didn't really grow attached to any of the characters and some of them annoyed me. It is the story of Willie Upton who returns to her hometown of Templeton, NY with her life in shambles, just as a mysterious "monster" is pulled out of the town's lake. She finds out that her mother has been lying to her throughout her life about who her father is, and she decides to find the truth once and for all. It just didn't make sense to me that her mother would finally tell her she'd been lying all these years, but still refuse to tell her who her father is, making her dig through generations of family history to try to find it for herself. The family history was confusing, the family trees included did little to help and it just bored me.

But I finished it, and that is a lot of reading time I'll never get back. Someone posted a meme on facebook recently that said, "Life is too short to read bad books". I really feel I need to take this more seriously. I don't have a lot of time for reading, so why should I waste time? When someone chooses a book for my book club, I like to read it before the meeting. I want to see why they've chosen it. But I never want to take months to finish a book again.

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