Fat Tuesday by Sandra Brown

June 19, 2007
Book suggested by Lucia, and meeting hosted by Judy.

This book has the honor of getting the lowest individual score thus far from one of our members. Others thought the book was OK, or even pretty good, but nobody gave it rave reviews. Those who have read Sandra Brown before reported that this was not necessarily a good representation of her typical style and quality. Lucia shared that the author began writing in 1981, and has had 55 best sellers of the 68 books she’s written. We couldn’t figure out the math because another on-line article said that she only writes about one book a year !?!

Many of us agreed that this was a quick, easy read. It was difficult to keep the characters straight in the beginning of the book and some of us had to resort to taking notes for the first few chapters. This problem was due in part to the use of unusual character names that were easily confused with one another. In fact one of us said the character naming was the worst thing about the book! Those of us that like detective novels thought the book had enough surprises in the storyline to keep us interested. One of our members had trouble getting through the book because she found the storyline to be too realistic in a negative sense, and just doesn’t like to read books like that.

Few characters in this book could be considered to be “good guys,” and that was disheartening to some of us. Our favorite character was Dredd. It would have been easier to have empathy for Gregory if he wasn’t a sexual predator. We thought that Pinkie’s need to control and his feelings of invincibility were sure to lead to self-destruction eventually. We could understand how difficult it was for Remy to escape from Pinkie considering the sense of responsibility and love that she felt for her sister, Flarra. We could easily understand why Burke Basile’s relationship with Nanci was strained at best. While the ending was a bit predictable, it still kept most of us in suspense until the end.

We did enjoy the challenge of assigning movie actors to play these characters, and thought that Bruce Willis might play a good Burke Basile (or maybe younger versions of Lee Majors or Sylvester Stalone would be a good fit!). We liked Gene Hackman for Pinkie and thought the beautiful curvy Eva Longoria could play Remy.

Definitely not one of our favorite books but not too bad for some . . .

Sandra Brown's website: http://www.sandrabrown.net/