I kept ploughing through this book, assuming it would eventually, at some point, have to get better, in the sense that it could not continue to get embarrassingly worse, and perhaps it was all a trick. A secret to be revealed later.

But it continued to get embarrassingly worse. The characters are not credible, the plot is not credible, the dialogue is excruciating. It is painful to read, and makes the reader sorry for the author, who surely must be embarrassed by it himself. It is the kind of book that you want to destroy when you are finished, so that no one else might be tempted to start reading it.

Whatever happened to Russell Banks? Was this book written as an experiment by a middle school class?