Book Review: Practical Jean
Practical Jean: A Novel by Trevor Cole
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
Jean Vale Horemarsh is an ordinary, small-town woman with the usual challenges of middle age. She’s content, mostly, with the life she’s built: a semi-successful career as a ceramics artist, a close collection of women friends (if you ignore the terrible falling out she had with Cheryl all those years ago), a comfortable marriage with a kind if otherwise unextraordinary man. And then Jean sees her mother go through the final devastating months of cancer, and realizes that her fondest wish is to protect her dearest friends from the indignities of aging and illness. That’s when she decides to kill them all. . .
This book is a dark, dark comedy. There are definitely disturbing and unsettling things that happen throughout. You must have a certain sense warped sense of humor to enjoy it. If you do, you will love it like I did. The humor and story vaguely reminded me of the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. Maybe because this book is written by a Canadian and takes place in Canada so the characters all have that Northern nice thing going on like the characters in Fargo. The reason Jean is killing her friends in the first place is because she loves them so much, because she is so nice.
Jean is a wonderful character. Flashbacks to Jean’s childhood show why Jean ended up in a place where she thinks that killing her friends is actually doing them a favor. She’s a sympathetic serial killer and so weirdly reasonable that she can almost convince you that what she is doing is okay. If you’re a fan of black humor, you’ll be a fan of this book.
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(I received this book courtesy of the Goodreads First Reads program.)
