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Jump to navigationJump to searchBitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong (view source)
Revision as of 11:00, 21 August 2011
, 11:00, 21 August 2011no edit summary
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I have to admit, I found the synesthesia element to the book a good hook to get me interested in reading it, but the way in which Truong portrayed quickly irritated me. She follows each word with the taste associated with, so we get dialogue like
''DeAnne'' cannedcranberrysauce ''wants'' saltedbutter ''us to drive'' cannedbakedbeans ''to Boiling'' parsley ''Springs'' lemonJell-O'' . This is bearable with the sparse dialogue in the first half, but in a couple of comparatively dialogue-heavy pages near the end of the book had me having to break from reading it for a lie down!
So, the first half is significantly better that the second part, perhaps because Truong is a lyrical writer who can clearly describe people and places very well. There's some enjoyable bits here, to be fair – ''Baby Harper wasn't a fat man, but he ate like a fat man.'' They're just too spread out, and they're almost instead of
