The Perfect Reader

Synopsis: At the news of her father’s death, Flora quits her big-city magazine job and returns to Darwin, the quaint New England town where she grew up, to retreat into the house he has left her, filled as it is with reminders of him. Even weightier is her appointment as her father’s literary executor. It seems he was secretly writing poems at the end of his life—love poems to a girlfriend Flora didn’t know he had. Flora soon discovers that this woman has her own claims on Lewis’s poetry and his memory, and in the righteousness of her loss and bafflement at her father’s secrets—his life so richly separate from her own in ways she never guessed—Flora is highly suspicious of her. Meanwhile, Flora is besieged by well-wishers and literary bloggers alike as she tries to figure out how to navigate it all: the fate of the poems, the girlfriend who wants a place in her life, her memories of her parents’ divorce, and her own uncertain future.


I'm putting this one back on the to-read shelf. Although I doubt I ever will. I expect this to be a permanent fixture on the Did Not Finish shelf. Flora is one of the least likeable main characters I've come across. She is a whiner and doesn't seem to have any redeeming qualities. I made it through my standard 100 pages and then skimmed through the rest of the book to see if she got more interesting or likeable...not that I could see. I really, quite honestly, don't care if she does and I'm missing it. I don't care if she reconciles herself to all the things she doesn't know about her father. I don't care if she "does right" by his literary estate and the poems he's left behind. Don't care.