The Earthquake Machine by Mary Pauline Lowry

He is abrupt to the point of rudeness, and yet oddly kind. While Marianne has had her share of men attracted to her because they want to rescue her, Keir makes no concession to her condition. Marianne's passionate nature finds solace and expression in music, a love she finds she shares with Keir, a man she encounters on her doorstep one winter's night.

Time taken to read - 2 days Blurb From Goodreads Blind since birth, widowed in her twenties, now lonely in her forties, Marianne Fraser lives in Edinburgh in elegant, angry anonymity with her sister, Louisa, a successful novelist. I'm not sure if I would read this author again, if I did it will be when this book is a distant memory. Overall it dragged and didn't hold my interest and I found it a real chore to read and finish it so 1/5 for me. I was bored for most of the book (intrigued before the first suicide but bored and annoyed thereafter), the chapter lengths varied as well, one was only say 12 or 14 pages long and another was over 80. Maybe there was some deep and hidden meaning to the book but I failed to see it.

Why did the girls choose to involve the people they did and why in that way.

Why no-one stepped in, said anything, done anything. There was no depth to any of the characters, I felt no reasons or explanations for the way the parents were or even the girls. The book tells from the point of view of kids they grew up with and always refers to 'we would see them or we watched from outside' yet never said who the we were. Blurb From Goodreads This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter’s spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates “the year of the suicides.” My Review Ugh I was so disappointed by this book! I thought we were going to get an in depth look at the girls lives, what happened to make them all do what they did and behave as they did but was left with just as many questions if not more by the time I got through it.

The Earthquake Machine by Mary Pauline Lowry