Reviews this week:

Skin Game by Jim Butcher

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free by Charles P. Pierce

 

Recently finished:
All Fall DownAll Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Fiction

 Allison is living what seems to be an ideal life as a stay at home mother in the suburbs with a burgeoning blogging career.  But her daughter is difficult, her mother is unable to care for her father with Alzheimer’s, and her husband is getting farther and farther away from her.  To keep it together Allison is taking a few pills.  They aren’t dangerous.  They came from the doctor after all.  And if after a while she needs to work harder to remember which doctor she can safely call for a refill this time, it doesn’t mean that she has a problem.

This is the story of an upper middle class woman’s descent into drug abuse.  It isn’t the first story that people think of when they hear “addict.”  That’s part of the reason why Allison doesn’t think the word applies to her.  In rehab she gets to know women who were using drugs the numb the pain of years of abuse.  They are dismissive of her as a privileged white woman who for some reason couldn’t cope with her life.

This book was most interesting before and after rehab.  In rehab she just comes off as whiny.

This isn’t the laugh out loud funny book that most people expect from this author due to the subject matter but it is an interesting look at an aspect of addiction that most people don’t recognize.