Jason Silver

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

The Shape of Snakes

The Shape of Snakes was, I think, my second (or third?) Minette Walters book, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. It took a while to really get going-- I found the narrative style a little confusing at first. As one reviewer put it,

The first-person narrative of The Shape of Snakes is broken up by documents, letters, and statements of various kinds, which provide our only alternative source of information when we start to wonder just how much the narrator's account is concealing. We never learn her first name — she is just M. — and she remains surprisingly distant...

Once I got used to the style-- I think maybe 150 pages in, I started to really enjoy it. It means one can't take the narrator's descriptions at face-value. The reader must interpret the narrator's opinions based on the other character's responses.

All said, I recommend this book. It's an entertaining murder mystery. 4.5 stars.

~Jason