[i'd know you anywhere]

I accidentally posted this to the Early Reviews group.

I won i'd know you anywhere from the April batch. I didn't receive it until recently, so I'm reading it now. I'm so disappointed! I'm only finishing it because I have to review it. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste my time. It's a stinker!

Anyone else win this book? What do you think of it?

The ratings for this one are all over the board although most people gave it a three or four star rating. I'll be interested in why you don't like it. I asked LT whether I would like it and I got:

LibraryThing thinks you will love I'd Know You Anywhere (prediction confidence: very high)

I love using that. I take it with a grain of salt, of course, but it is fun to see if I really like what LT thinks I will.

I never knew there was such thing. How do you have LT predict whether you'd like a book?

I haven't finished i'd know you anywhere yet. Still have about 100 pages to go. I work all day so can only read in the evening. And I'm slow with this book.

But when I finish, I promise, I'll post a review.

When you go to a book's page, below the Recommendations and above the Member Reviews sections, there is a Will You Like It section. Click on the Will You Like It link below the section header, and you'll get a response. Sometimes there is not enough information to make a prediction, and you will be told that when that's the case. Usually it is because there isn't enough information about the book, but I imagine it would also happen if someone doesn't have many books on her shelves.

I'm always learning new things about LT, and I love it!

TIA for your review!

Continuing to be off-topic, I finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon last night. LT reported a very high level of confidence that I would probably not like the book, but I loved it. Thus, the grain of salt. But to be fair to LT's prediction algorithm, I also thought that I probably wouldn't like it and just read it because it was part of a book group read and it was short.

It's part of the fun of reading. :)

You all might not be aware: the "Will You Like It?" section isn't really about a subjective enjoyment of the work in question. It judges how likely you are to have the work catalogued, using the MWYB algorithms. Just like how the Recommendations don't really care about how highly rated/well-liked a work is, just that similar people to you have it, but you don't.

Thanks, Keristars. I thought that it was probably based on something along those lines and it can't truly know whether I'll like any given book, but I enjoy using it anyway.

OK, I finshed reading it, and here's my review.

I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE by Laura Lippman begins with Eliza living a typical housewife life. She and her husband have two kids, and she feels like she lives in her car, driving them around town. She loves her unexciting life and her children: the little boy, who is agreeable and sweet, and his older sister, not agreeable and sweet. The story continues for another 40 or so pages with descriptions of Eliza’s interactions with her children and her remembrances of growing up with her jealous and nasty sister. But what does all this have to do with the story, you wonder. Not much.

Then Eliza receives a letter. It is written by a female hand but is from her rapist.

Eliza had been abducted when she was 15-years-old. Her abductor was trying to find a girlfriend. Really. He grabbed countless, but at least three, girls and killed all but one—Eliza. He raped Eliza.

Now, shortly before his scheduled execution, he wants to speak with Eliza. So he dictates a letter to a woman who is against the death penalty, who has befriended him, and she mails the letter to Eliza. Really. It’s that easy for a rapist to contact his victim from prison, at least in this story.

Eliza, rather than contacting the authorities about this, goes through the trouble of having a separate telephone line installed in her house just for the rapist’s calls. Really.

And, remember, prisoners must make their calls collect. She accepts the charges. Really.

But now he says he wants to speak with her in person. So she arranges a last-minute-before-they-execute-him visit because her sister just happens to know all the right people. Really.

Eliza thinks he’s going to be honest with her. Really.

The story shifts its point of view periodically from Eliza to her rapist or to the woman who has befriended the rapist or to the mother of one of the murdered girls. Always, though, we shift back to Eliza.

I was so disappointed in I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE! This story made me want to scream at all the characters. They all do stupid things. I list only a few here. (The least stupid is Eliza’s sister, the one who she remembers as such an awful person.)

Besides, every single page of this book has something wrong with it: if a character isn’t doing something stupid, something implausible is happening or paragraphs are rambling on and on about something that has nothing to do with the story.

This is an honest review of a book I won from the librarything.com Early Reviewer program. It was an early look at the paperback edition of the book.

Thank you for yout thoughts, teched. I haven't decided yet whether I'll give this one a try. It still sounds interesting to me, even with the faults you mentioned. But it probably won't be very high on my TBR.

I'll probably give it away through goodreads.com bookswap. It's paperback but in good shape, just read once. Look for it there.

Thank you, that is very generous. I'm sure someone will snap it up and enjoy it. If I decide to read it, I'll probably get a copy from the library. I request or buy only those books I really, really want to read or keep, and I don't think this one fits into that category.

"I request or buy only those books I really, really want to read or keep"

That's my policy, too. But I thought wrong when I asked for this book. I really liked another book she wrote, so I thought I'd like this one, too.

I've done that as well, techeditor. By all the descriptions I've read and by the Great Algorithm, it seems I will love a specific book I request, but then I have been disappointed. Fortunately, that hasn't happened often, but you never know for sure until you read the book, not just the descriptions, reviews, and hype.