Saturday, June 8, 2013

The Girl, The Gold Tooth and Everything by Francine LaSala

4.5 Star

Mina Clark is losing her mind—or maybe it’s already gone. She isn’t quite sure. Feeling displaced in her over-priced McMansion-dotted suburban world, she is grappling not only with deep debt, a mostly absent husband, and her playground-terrorizer 3-year old Emma, but also with a significant amnesia she can’t shake—a “temporary” condition now going on several years, brought on by a traumatic event she cannot remember, and which everyone around her feels is best forgotten. A routine trip to the dentist changes everything for Mina, and suddenly she's not sure if what's happening is real, of if she's just now fully losing her mind... especially when she realizes the only person she thought she could trust is the one she fears the most.



Kathryn - 4.5 Star

In the end I stayed up way too late again reading this one but it was bit of a slow starter for me. I was initially really frustrated by our protagonist Mina’s memory loss. I wanted to skip things to get to the reason for her amnesia but I forced myself to slow down and read every word, which was good because otherwise I’m sure I would have missed something important.

The Girl, The Gold Tooth and Everything is a quirky title for an equally quirky novel. It’s a thriller in a sense because there’s mystery and a hint of murder and deceit in the air but it’s also peppered with every day activities. A mother struggling to remember her past while dealing with a rambunctious toddler demanding her attention made for a scattered storyline but this is all in aid of the thriller aspect of the story- which I wasn’t even aware of for the first third of the book! I spent a lot of time trying not to dislike most of the supporting characters, none of them appealed to me which now makes sense as you won’t know until the end who are the friends and who are the foes. Mina herself was like a lost soul and I just wanted to fix her as her husband Jack appeared to want to do also but I wasn’t sure I could trust him either!

I was completely thrown by the ending and actually by a lot of things in the middle too, and I truly wish I could say more but that would definitely give the game away so I’ll have to stick with saying that it was both too short and too long a book. I wanted to race to the end of The Girl, The Gold Tooth and Everything but wanted more details on every page and enjoyed it thoroughly!

Thank you to Francine Lasala for our review copy. All opinions are our own.


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