Reviewer Rank:
136 - Total Helpful Votes: 899 of 997
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
How do we develop relationships with people? What does our memory mean in these relationships? Is it possible to form a relationship with someone who can not remember that he ever met you even though you see him every day? Yoko Ogawa has written a perfect, poetic story that tries to explore these questions.
The book is written from the point of view of a woman hired to be a housekeeper for a retired math professor. The professor was in a car accident that damaged his brain, destroying his short term memory. Every day she arrives to do her job and the professor has no memory of her ever being there before. When the professor finds out that the housekeeper is a single mom with a… Read more
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A novel doesn't have to be 100% believable but if an author is going to make the story absurd, she has to at least build up to the absurdity. In this novel the author makes no effort to make any part of the story the slightest bit believable. Right from the start we get Archie who is back on the force in spite of constantly popping pain killers. Does anyone really think a man who takes four Vicodin at a time would be trusted with a gun?
===spoiler alert===
But then the whole premise of the story is ridiculous. Does anyone really think that the worst serial killer in a state's history would be able to escape from prison? Does anyone really think that a guard would help her… Read more
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
It only takes a few points to make a novel worth reading... characters you care about, a well-described setting, and some kind of interesting conflict. Unfortunately, "The Good Thief" has none of these. The characters are poorly developed and I assume we are supposed to develop sympathy for them because of their missing hand or their "harelip" (an offensive term the author continually uses to describe one character). The setting is confused as it isn't clear when the story takes place. We are told that shotguns are common which would place it in the period after the Civil War but one character is described as being a member of the American Society of Dental Surgeons, an organization the… Read more
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