This is not a review. More of a warning, I suppose. The reason it’s not a review is that I can’t write one for a book that I didn’t finish, and I didn’t even come close to finishing Jane Harper’s debut novel, The Dry.

The real question is why it sold over a million copies. I guess there must be something in the Australian mindset that attracts readers of a certain type, but I’m certainly not of that type. FWIW, comments from Amazon reviewers ranged from “held me in suspense throughout” to the following:

I wanted to like this because the description and a few reviews were promising. But the characters are mostly underdeveloped and their motives and attitudes largely inscrutable. The main character is an unsympathetic dolt, and it gets tiring when almost every character is moaning about something decades ago. The parallel story (all the parts in italics) explains what’s really going on, but there’s no organic source for those explanations – they’re just offered from . . . who knows, but it’s the only way to explain what happened. Certainly the police guys don’t develop any evidence. So the whole thing has a mechanical quality to it in which “what really happened” is just thrown in at the end so that, you know, you would know. Because none of the characters can tell you. Disappointing.

Janet Maslin in the New York Times called it a “breathless page-turner,” but it didn’t work for me. I didn’t hold my breath, and I fell asleep instead of turning the next page.

Categories: Books