Smile Sewn Shut: A Modern-Day Gothic

This was, unfortunately, bad on a technical level, the prose is choppy, the tense keeps switching mid paragraph. Half the page count is dedicated to describing food and dress, which drove me insane. I'm still not sure if they were intentionally trying to emulate american psychos brand name dropping in a way, or just juvenile writing, as this problem of over describing needless details is something I see most often in debut ya fiction. A lot of details are given haphazardly with no rhyme or reason, Melanie's backstory is seemingly randomly inserted throughout. While the information in it is relevant (certainly more so than what flavor of milkshake she is drinking that chapter), often it disrupts the flow.

Characters acted over the top, talking normally one second and yelling the next. It made sense for the main character, but everyone talked like that. I'm once again unsure if this was done intentionally or not. I suppose not every book benefits from realistic characters. Though I think it would nice if other characters were more down to earth to contrast with Melanie here.

A lot of the passages about Melanie's clients were unnecessary, and more a bit confusing on how she has this much detail. For example why is a wifebeater giving the details of his lifelong abuse of his wife randomly out? Although the narration is omniscient, it is also often outright stated Melanie has similar information as the reader does. The details on the child victim were wholly unnecessary. I don't think the story benefited from it in any way.

Despite all my complaining at some point, something clicked and I decided to enjoy it like a b-movie. I didn't mind the characters anymore at that point. I genuinely started enjoying it a lot. This is the closest we have to Lesbian American Psycho. It's not the most polished work in the world but I can't deny it was fun.

I feel bad ragging on an indie title, especially one I ultimately recommend, but I can't not point out my problems. Maybe that I liked the book despite all my complaints could serve as a recommendation in itself.

Here are some cws because there is a lot and not all is obvious Obvious ones, death, a lot of descriptions of dead bodies, a lot of gross medical stuffAbleism, directed at the main character. The main character is autistic and she is obviously, kind of not a great person to put it mildly, you could consider it ableist on a meta level depending on how you read this. Racism, bullyingcheating & domestic violenceNecrophilia, graphic, kind of...arguably consensual? I don't even know man rape, child abuse including sexual abuse not descriptive but on page, not really relevant to the actual story. Oh and kidnapping. literally. see above my comment on it being unnecessary.