The Nobodies Album Book

I loved Parkhurst writing, how she so precisely describes human emotion where I can connect with the moment and say "yes, I know what you're talking about; I've felt that too." I love it when a book captures my own epiphanies and experiences in life and feeds them back to me.

It is because of this that I connected with Octavia Frost. Battling regrets in her personal life, she writes a novel compiled of the endings of her previous works with new endings. On the day she is submitting the project to her editor, she learns that her estranged, rock-star son has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. I think I enjoyed Milo's character more than Octavia's, not because I liked him more but because I didn't. He was a complex character I enjoyed exploring as much as Octavia did from outside his inner circle.

As she sets out to redevelop a relationship with him and delve into his innocence or guilt, her story is dispersed with the excepts from this novel of regrets. As a literary device, showing that Octavia had regrets and that an author always puts herself in her novels, I enjoyed the excerpts, but it didn't always work realistically. The excepts worked as summaries of these fictitious novels so I never believed they were actual excerpts of last chapters. They seemed more like discarded ideas that weren't enough of a story for an entire novel. My other issue with the excerpts were the interruption. The shorter ones I did not mind, but a couple of them were lengthier tandems that I would have liked.

My other complaint about the book would be the ending (no spoilers). It wasn't bad, but after Octavia's comment (which I can't find right now) that an ending should not be predictable but the reader should feel like it was the only logical conclusion, I was expecting that sort of conclusion. Instead I was given an ending like the excerpts, a summary that wasn't inevitable. It read more like an epilogue. I get the correlation to the excerpts and that Octavia did have to accept the ending her life was heading toward, that she could change her regrets, but I would have preferred to be wowed.

They are few and minor complaints. Since this was an ARC, there were also several mistakes, mostly with punctuation, but I expect will be fixed by the release. Even though it took me a good week to read this story, I was into it and savored much of it. Overall, I think Parkhurst is a very talented author. I will be checking out her other books, which I rarely am inspired to do. When I can find them, I'll come back and list some of my favorite quotes.