Utterly useless story...Blue Diary

Blue Diary was given to me as a gift from one of my friend’s and I have to say that I have come to seriously question her taste in books because this is the second one that she has given to me that I did not enjoy. I was bored, straight up through to about the fifth chapter and seriously wanted to stop reading. But I just couldn’t bring myself to not finish a book after I had started reading it already. So I settled down this past weekend and tried to read through it as fast as I could, but ended up with many breaks in between.


~ The Story ~
In the town of Monroe, Massachusetts, Ethan Ford is known to be the best man. He’s smart, a loving father and husband, a great baseball coach, and can always be relied on for anything. So when he doesn’t show up for work one morning, people begin to worry. But we soon find out that Ethan isn’t “superman”, he’s just a regular man, with needs of his own. Ethan has decided to spend the morning in bed with his wife of thirteen years, Jorie. They are both too wrapped up in themselves to worry about the world around them. Ethan forgets about the job he had to do that morning, and Jorie forgets about her good friend Charlotte who is going through a divorce and some health problems. They have the perfect family life.

Until...

they are rudely awaken from their morning dreams when there is a knock at the front door. The knock happens to be that of an apologetic police officer, come to arrest Ethan for the murder of a young girl. Here we then get flashbacks of Ethan’s life, when he spills his story to Jorie as she visits him in his jail cell. How his father has died when he was young, he had a mother who could not control him, he was a high-school drop-out that pursued young girls and got them into trouble. How he had spent time in jail once for assaulting a baseball coach, when he was told that he wouldn’t make it into the minors in Baltimore.

And how did he get himself into trouble? Leaving his hometown fifteen years ago, he passed through the small town of Holden and stopped at a convenience store. He just happened to meet a girl there and made plans to meet up with her that night. When she doesn’t show, he becomes enraged and climbs into her bedroom window at home, after having too much to drink. He is mighty upset with the girl and slams her a little too hard against the bedroom wall when she panics. He doesn’t even notice that she is dead until after he has already raped her. The life of a 15-year old has been put out in an instant of rage and alcoholic influence combined.

Ethan’s poor son Collie is traumatized by the ordeal and wants nothing much to do with his father and neither does Jorie. Though can you blame them after being duped for so many years? Only learning the real story when Ethan decides to spill the beans, after he is already sitting in a cell.

It is actually Collie’s friend Katya who spies the picture of Ethan on TV and makes an anonymous call to the police to turn her friends’ father in. So throughout the rest of the story, we are given Katya’s thoughts and possibly regrets on turning in Ethan, making Collie’s life miserable. Katya struggles with this knowledge of what she has done, along with the still fresh pain of her fathers’ suicide a few years earlier. Hoffman's mistake with this girl is that she is unbelievable, because she seems to be awfully grown-up for somone so young.

Ethan’s friends rally around him, saying that he is a changed man and not the murderer he used to be. Excuse me? That’s exactly what Jorie thinks about the man that is her husband...how can she rally behind him when she does not know who is really is?


~ MY THOUGHTS ~
I don’t know what it was about this story, but I just could not get interested in it. I think it was a combination of the plot and the characters that made it so ridiculous to read. Most of the characters were just not interesting no matter how much Hoffman tried to make them so. When I cannot like at least one of the characters, I know that there is a problem with the book. The whole story just lacks substance.

I really did not like the Ethan character, but it was funny to read about how “perfect” the man was, and then come to learn what his character was really like. He is just made out to be too perfect and you have to think about what the character is hiding. It almost makes you want to jump for joy in finding out about his dark side, because no one can be that perfect. I’m not saying that people cannot make mistakes and then learn from them, becoming a better person later on. I wholly believe that people can (or I wouldn’t be in the job field that I am). But it is just the fact that Ethan was never punished for what he did to the young girl and expected not to be.

Most of the other characters were just too lacking to mention besides that of Jorie and Collie. Collie struggled, with the fact that his father was a murderer, throughout the rest of the book. He was never really developed past that point. Jorie was just a stricken wife after she learned of the man her husband really was. She wrestled with standing by him, though not for long. But what would your reaction be to something like this if it happened to you? I would have to venture a guess that it would be probably along the same lines as Jorie’s reaction. She at least allowed Ethan the little respect that he earned as a changed man and listened to his story.

The setup of the story was like that of many books. Part of the story was told in first person from Katya’s point of view, another from Jorie’s point of view and the rest was told as a regular story...not as someone’s thoughts. The chapters pretty much alternate between those these ways of story-telling. Each time it became Katya’s time to narrate, it was time for Hoffman’s to shine. She really brought out the girls twisted emotions and feelings at this point. These chapters made reading the book a little more bearable. But the fact remains that I was given a headache from all the jumping from one person telling their story, to another person telling their story, and then on to another person telling their story.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned in this book, if you can stomach the retarded plot line enough to read the story thoroughly. Young Katya is the one character that was totally transformed in this story. She will grow up and soon learn not to be so hard on herself and realize that she did the right thing not matter the consequences. Although she turned Ethan in, she felt immense guilt at doing so because Collie was her friend. I just couldn’t get into it. Maybe it was because I couldn’t accept the fact that the town rallied behind this murderer, still believing him to be a great person. But despite their disappoint, the towns people learn to go on afterwards. Jorie and Collie most of all have learned that life is not always perfect and you are almost never given the perfect hand in life. Life can be rough at times, but they also learn to go on.

But I cannot recommend this book at all. The characters were just not developed and neither was the story despite the fact that all of the elements were there. But I just did not feel like I knew the characters or what their point was. Nor did I wholly understand what the point of the story was. Blue Diary is not your typical feel good end well story, and there were a lot of loose ends.


~ Happy Reading!

Kim


ISBN: 0-399-14802-7
Format Read: Hardcover
Pages: 303
Price: $24.95