Catherine Siebel's Reviews > Cracks

This is, hands down, among the worst books I have ever read. I have no idea what other people see in it. My gripes are many, but I'll try to limit them to things that people might find useful:

1) The narrative style -- it's written in first-person plural, which means the voice is always a "we", with no concrete sense of whom that includes. This makes is extremely difficult to conjure any sympathy for the narrator, which I imagine the reader should feel.

2) Lack of characterization -- This book is 165 pages, with 20 characters (not including the semi-omniscient "we"), which means that you get one personality trait or moment for each character. Consequently, it's difficult to care about any of them.

3) Missing the historical mark - Based on some vague clues, this book seems to take place in South Africa in the 1940s/50s at an all-white, all-girls school. Not a single mention of apartheid? Really?

4) Gratuitous homoeroticism -- other reviewers note the "honesty" about the girls' sexuality. Have any of these people ever BEEN 14-year-old girls? Did you really all strip naked around each other just for giggles -- repeatedly? Of course not. You were as self-conscious as the rest of us.

5) Insipid chapter titles: "Why Miss G Called Us to Her Room"; "Who Was Invited to the Feast and Why?" "What Miss G Said About Fiamma". If I can't deduce these points from the chapter, you haven't written a very good book.

I could go on about the laughably bad ending, the snippets of the worst and most useless poetry I have ever encountered, etc. Suffice it to say: the only reason I finished this book was because I was reading it for a book club. I threw it across the room in disgust no fewer than three times.