Thalia @ Pictures in the Words

This one is somehow tougher than the other book. It doesn't feel like some chick-lit murder mystery. Not when you off-handedly throw in a fourteen-year-old boy's suicide attempt.

What makes me angry is that the whole neighborhood just gossips about everyone else. And when Lucy's (the main character) daughter comes in, she asks what happened and Lucy just flat out tells her, "Tommy tried to kill himself. He tried to hang himself." I sure hope any parent with half a brain wouldn't go telling kids, FRIENDS, something like that. It's deplorable. That girl is going to tell her friends. And the whole school will end up knowing that this little kid was hopeless enough after his mom was murdered that he wanted to end his life.

And what does Lucy, our grand heroine, do? She assumes he tried to kill himself because he must have killed his mother. No, it's not like it's not surprising that there are teenage boys who get bullied, picked on by their dad, hazed by their teammates, have their mom brutally killed (then told by a random stranger) and they somehow think the world is hopeless. Lucy is an imbecile. She honestly has no idea what she's doing when it comes to being tactful. And she's probably going to write about it in the newspaper, as if that's exactly what would help the situation.

I can't stand it. I just can't stand the insensitivity.