Ketaki Nirkhi's Reviews > Brain Damage

** spoiler alert ** Brain Damage by Freida McFadden

About the book:

After years of hard work, Dr. Charly McKenna finally has it all. Prosperous career as a dermatologist? Check. Spacious apartment overlooking Central Park? Check. Handsome lawyer husband? Double check.

Then one night, a bullet rips through the right side of her skull and she loses everything.

As Charly struggles to recover from her brain injury, she begins to realize that the events of that fateful night are trapped in the damaged right side of her brain. Now she must put the jigsaw pieces together to discover the identity of the man who tried to kill her... before he finishes the job he started.

My take:

The book has been described on Amazon as a twisted psychological thriller that will keep you guessing. Well, I was certainly left guessing till the end about what I was reading!

After reading amazing five-star reviews, I purchased this book. And after reading two other psychological thrillers from the same author which I loved reading, I had absolutely no doubt in my mind. But I was in for a very big disappointment. This is easily one of the worst books I have read.

The story is about Dr. Charlotte Mckenna, a dermatologist, who has a great practice and owns a plush apartment overlooking the central park. She marries Clark, a handsome lawyer, who was once her patient, and pursued her till she agreed. One day, she gets shot in the head and develops hemispatial neglect on her left side of the body, along with loss of memory.

I had expected it to be a nice thriller where the story builds to the climax where she gets shot, and we are left wondering who did it and why. However, right from page 1, you easily guess who did it and why.

The main character, Charlotte, is hardly likable in the part before she was shot. She has absolutely no self-esteem and probably that is how she tolerates the jerk of a husband she married without even getting to know him better. Her cat seems to have better intelligence and instincts. Even in the part after she was shot, he is absent from her life for the majority part, and then reappears to make a deal with Charlotte about taking care of her in return for using her disability payments to sponsor his and his girlfriend's stay at Charlotte's apartment, humiliating and insulting her in every way possible. The same girlfriend he was cheating on with before she got shot. And yet Charlotte puts up with him just because she feels she has no other option! This was too spineless for my taste!

There are hardly any other characters to make us even suspect anyone else, and none of the characters is well developed. Almost 80% of the story is like a memoir of a person who is recovering from severe brain injury and focuses on unnecessary details of speech therapy, occupational therapy, and physiotherapy that lead the story nowhere.

The only character I really liked was Jamie, but again, his character seemed very sporadic, he wasn't any valuable addition to the story, and the way his relationship with Charlotte was stretched till the very end was irritating.

The author being a physician, I can say she has written this part brilliantly, giving us a real picture inside a rehabilitation centre for the brain-damaged. But that is not why I picked this book for. It is very depressing to read and doesn’t add anything to the story at all.

So even though I like the author and the way she writes, this book could have been promoted as a diary of a brain-injured person, and not as a psychological thriller that keeps us guessing till the end. The only thing I kept guessing was when the book would actually end.

I rate it one star, the lowest I have ever rated.