She Treads Softly: Last Breath

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Last Breath

Last Breath by Karin Slaughter
Witness Impulse: 7/11/17
eBook review copy; 176 pages
ISBN-13: 9780062742155

Last Breath by Karin Slaughter is a very highly recommended short novel that is a prequel to her upcoming novel, The Good Daughter. It also stands alone as an excellent story.

Charlie Quinn is a lawyer visiting a group of Girl Scouts for career night when she suddenly feels ill and runs to the bathroom where fifteen year-old honor student Flora Faulkner assists her. Afterwards, Flora asks for Charlie's help to become an emancipated minor. It seems that Flora's grandparents are spending all her trust money on themselves and there won't be anything left for Flora to attend college. How could Charlie refuse to help a girl who lost her mother, just as Charlie did. Soon it is clear that the case is much more complicated than it originally appeared.

What a wonderfully written, outstanding twisty tale. Charlie is a great character and Slaughter proves how accomplished she is at character development and setting the location, and doing so in an abbreviated number of pages. It was a pleasure to read Last Breath and only makes me more anxious to read The Good Daughter (released on 8/8/17). This prequel is set thirteen years before events in The Good Daughter.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Witness Impulse.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.