Eyes Wide Open by Andrew Gross

 

I wouldn't call this a complete dumpster fire, but it's not a very good book. Not that one should expect a good book from an author who apprenticed under James Patterson--if I'd seen that I'd have probably skipped this book. The author here is working out a great deal of pain pretty, shaping the text to pretty explicitly mimic at least some things from his reality; I'm not sure he really needed to drag in the Manson knock-off, or try to write about said Manson Knock-off having any particular reach outside of prison: Manson was a pretty skilled manipulator, but he aged out of any relevance really quickly, in spite of what the Geraldo Riveras of the world would like people to believe. There's not much here to justify suspending disbelief, the characters never really make much sense, even the ones who are relatively sympathetic make some persistently bad choices, the prose is at best nothing special (I didn't note any gratuitous garbage writing); the ending is clearly as much about the author's pain as the story, which is fine, but the epilogue is kinda a steaming pile. Not bad enough to DNF but not a novel that really added to my life experience.