Book Club October 2016

By: Susan H. Crawford
Published Year: 2015
Publisher: William Morrow
Pages: 350

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Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Dana Catrell is horrified to learn she was the last person to see her neighbor Celia alive. Suffering from a devastating mania, a result of her bipolar disorder, Dana finds that there are troubling holes in her memory, including what happened on the afternoon of Celia's death. As evidence starts to point in her direction, Dana struggles to clear her name before her own demons win out.

Is murder on her mind—or is it all in her head?

The closer she comes to piecing together shards of her broken memory, the more Dana falls apart. Is there a murderer lurking inside her... or is there one out there in the shadows of reality, waiting to strike again? A story of marriage, murder and madness, The Pocket Wife explores the world through the foggy lens of a woman on the edge.

                                                                             What I thought

Dana wakes up from a drunken stupor to ambulances at her neighbor’s house. When she walks over she finds the woman who she was drinking with just hours before murdered on the living room floor. Dana has no memory of what happened shortly after arriving at her neighbor’s house after she started drinking. She finds she was the last one to see her alive and is concerned that she might have had something to do with it. Dana is dealing with bipolar disorder and finds herself slowly slipping into a manic phase. She can’t remember what happened that day and she starts questioning whether or not clues that she’s found were created by her. Her husband doesn’t help matters by convincing her that most of what she is looking into is due to her madness.

I flew through this book. It is very fast paced and keeps you interested through every part of the story. I liked that the narrator is a bit unreliable because of the bipolar disorder and her descent into a mania. It’s not completely unpredictable, but what was most fascinating was watching how it unfolded as opposed to the mystery of figure out whodunit.

Dana is a unique narrator in that you aren’t sure what you can and cannot trust from her point of view. I felt myself wanting to believe everything that she did, but once she started doubting herself I started to doubt her as well. I appreciated that we also received a perspective from the detective, Jack, as well.

                                                What Book Club Thought

Everyone enjoyed the book but the narration was a big point of discussion. While some of us enjoyed the unreliability of the narrator, others found it irritating and almost too difficult to read. There were two book club members who didn't finish the book completely, and so it was fun to see what their guess was for who the killer was! The other interesting discussion point was Peter and how terrible of a person he was. If you are looking for a book club pick, I would recommend this one. We had a lot of discussion with it and it brought up some interesting opinions.