'WHAT RED WAS'..........YEP, WE CRASHED ANOTHER BOOK CLUB.......

What Red Was by Rosie Price (2019)     BQ always hesitates to delve into pure literary fiction.......

             Sometimes it's a rewarding experience......a tale well told with skillful, incisive prose......

              And sometimes, after you find yourself lured into the book by the promise of a potentially fascinating, compelling plot, the book sinks like a stone......drowned by the author's self-indulgent desire to impress the hell out of you with intricate sentences crafted from years in creative writing seminars....

               To put it bluntly, a lot of  literary fictioneers who come up with an irresistible story have trouble getting out of their own way when they try to tell it........

                Debut author Rosie Price's premise hooked us right away.......college student Kate Quaile falls into a long term platonic friendship fellow student Max Rippon........Max is among the millennial members of the wealthy, dysfunctional Rippon clan       (whose ups and downs could easily provide fodder for one of those 800 page 'family saga'  novels....)

                 At one of the many Rippon family gatherings that Kate's invited to, she's brutally raped by an odious Rippon cousin..........which sends her into  a sad, downward PTSD spiral of depression and self-harm.

                   Internalizing her pain, Kate's slow to reveal the rape and its perpetrator to anyone.......and as the drama builds, there comes a point where you're itching to know what happens next........you can't wait to reach Kate's climactic reckoning with the Rippon clan and the rapist among them......

                   And this is where literary fiction authors like newly minted novelist Rosie Price can't get out of their own way.......

                    They don't care if you're salivating to find out what happens.........they simply go about their deliberate business, with long descriptive passages filled with overwritten run-on sentences that slow the entire book down to a crawl.........

                     So don't let the book jacket description fool you into thinking it's any kind of a melodrama or thriller.  The author duly paints vivid portraits of both Kate's torment and the ever dysfunctional Rippons, but none of this leads to the kind of slam bang, punch-the-gut ending you'd hope for.

                   If you go into this understanding what the book will give you and what it won't, it's a fairly entertaining read.  But do not expect to finish this with any sort of emotional satisfaction.......
2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).........and we shouldn't even have to say this anymore, but for anyone who didn't check out previous BQ book posts, PAY NO FRIGGIN' ATTENTION TO THE AUTHOR BLURBS ON THE BACK COVER!!!! WORTHLESS HOT AIR.