Catharsis

Catharsis by Noorilhuda    270 pages

I almost hate to admit it, but I read this entire book. Not because it was a great read, but because I was infatuated with one of the main characters. And it has great bones.

Basically this book is about a Daniel, a ten-year-old boy who is kidnapped. He’s quickly found by police with minimal effort. The story starts off at a frantic pace. That’s Fiction Writing 101: Drop your readers in the middle of the action. But this time it didn’t pay off.  Police officer Aurora Fox is brutal. Immediately she’s unlikeable, and one of the major flaws in the story is that the main protagonist has to have one redeeming quality, one thing that the readers can latch onto.

Aurora is aided by a local puppeteer who came to the police station to offer his help. He knew where Daniel was being held and who was behind it. He’s right, but that doesn’t make Aurora trust him. I found the puppeteer to be the character I was fascinated with. I had hoped to learn about this craft or see how he was able to empathize with Aurora and Daniel, but that never came to be. Instead, he turned into a creepy Norman Bates-esque character.

Part of the problem with this story is that English in not the author’s language and it shows in the choppy sentence structure and the badly placed backstories.

Another irritant is that smackdab in the middle of the book, the reader learns who kidnapped Daniel. 

After that revelation, the book is a mishmash irrelevant happenstances.

I give Catharsis 1 out of 5 stars.