I wish I would write more book reviews. I am always reading, but most times I can’t muster the energy to write about the book finished. I feel bad for book reviewers. Remember when in school you had to write book reports? It ruined reading for me. I started reading adult books when I was seven, went through my grandmother’s bookcase ( a huge one), but once I was sixteen and was forced to read twenty books for each language (5)in my curriculum, the pleasure wore off. Afterwards it took years to get back to reading at the rate I was used to. 

Another reason I don’t write as many book reviews is that my mind is shot. My concentration seems to be lacking, I get distracted, bored. Getting old is just info overload. Sometimes I wish I could reset my mind, to be able to read without preconceptions. My former professor at the film faculty, he was in his fifties, once told me he almost never went to the cinema anymore. I thought it was weird, sad, and pledged I never to loose that sense of wonder and excitement when going to the movies. 

But it seeps in. You can’t help it. You have seen too much, read tot much. 

Let me get to this quick review of Since we fell by Dennis Lehane going, before I get even more sidetracked by whining. 

Fittingly, meandering is exactly what Lehane does in Since we fell. He added the first 100 pages of his novel later, filling in the back story of his main character, Rachel Childs. 

And it works. Since we fell starts like many other thrillers, with a flash forward to a crucial violent scene, Rachel shooting her husband.

But Lehane then takes his time getting there, exploring Rachel’s youth. She grows up with an academic mother, whose possessiveness and narcissism results in Rachel never getting to know her biological father. When her mother dies Rachel hires a private detective to find him. This leads to some interesting encounters. In another detour getting to the main plot, Rachel becomes a reporter and is send out to Haiti after the earthquake. A literal seismic shift in narrative.

It's the first time Lehane writes from a women’s perspective, and I was completely drawn in by Rachel. I think Lehane is on to something here. 

Every time I take a train I see these huge billboards pushing the latest thriller on the platforms. A dark cover, with a street, a street lantern, somebody running, you get the just. The blurb goes something like: He/She thought…, but…

Do these billboards work? They must, but I can never remember the name of the book once home, or anything about them, even if I always look at them. The same happens with most of the thrillers I read, if you would show me the cover after a few months I couldn’t tell you if I have read them or not. 

Man what a sad affair. 

It won’t happen with Since we fell. The way Lehane plays with plot, dissecting his main character, putting the slabs all over the table, shifting them around, is masterful. 

Strangely when he arrives at the part of the story, Rachel returning from Haiti, meeting this famous shifty husband, struggling with agoraphobia, (or is she being gaslit by her new husband), it is almost a letdown. Lehane wrote Since we fell at the same time that he was working on the script for it. The last part, a fast paced cat and mouse struggle, he wrote first, and the transition to it is so jarring that I started to think we were heading into Shutter Island territory, doubting the narrator and her claustrophobic  point of view. 

Here is where most thrillers start, twist and turns that by having seen them before remain shallow. But Lehane had his hooks in me deep, dragging me along to the bitter end.

I love TV shows, it's probably my favorite entertainment form now. What I love about them is that identification is done by more than making a problem relatable, it is the repetition, the deeper you dig into a character, the greater the attachment grows, the more you care. 101. It’s the same mechanism Lehane uses in Since we fell, exploring a complicate woman, and only then throwing her into a breakneck paced noirish thriller.

Reading a thriller like Since we fell reinvigorates me, and pacifies me. 

It’s the books that got small.