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Dec 14, 2013SuzeParker rated this title 2.5 out of 5 stars
All the way through reading Bent Road, I kept thinking, "This is such a weird little book." Certainly, allowing blame to fall on the wrong person and failing to honestly address horrible family secrets have dire consequences. Lori Roy makes that point in spades. What seemed weird was that, with all the dreadful experiences the Scott family suffers after moving to Kansas, they neither completely fall apart nor fully band together. Celia, who seems pretty attuned to her kids in one sense, isn't even aware that her youngest daughter is friendless at school. I grew up rural Kansas in exactly this time period, and this story bore virtually no resemblance to my small-town experience. Maybe I filtered the book, set in 1967, through the mindset of someone living in the 2000s, but it seemed to me that the way the several characters were drawn would also have made them behave differently than they did. The book is dark, dark, dark, and there's no relief from it.