Black Out

���After reading BEAUTIFUL LIES last year, I went out and bought everything Lisa Unger had ever written. Sadly, I didn't enjoy this book nearly as much as I liked BEAUTIFUL LIES. I found BLACK OUT very dark, in a gritty, uncomfortable way. I couldn't connect to any of the characters, and no matter how much I desperately wanted to like the heroine (the story was told from her 1st person POV), I couldn't. I found her weak and horribly victimized, and even when she finally took control of her life, to me she was too far gone for it to matter. I could never connect with her, could never muster either pity or sympathy for everything she'd been through. She was too much of a victim, and I wanted a true heroine. The story is well told, show more beautifully written, but it still didn't work for me. show less

A while back I requested a Lisa Unger book as an ARC, but didn’t win it. She’s been on my radar since and when some copies of her books came my way, I made sure to read one. Although I think the plot was needlessly convoluted, it was a fun book to read. Changeable. Crazy. Shifting. Never knowing which way was up. Like I said, fun. Not in any way believable, but it’s fiction so you have to go with it.

Annie/Ophelia is sympathetic and oddly not sympathetic. She reminds you too much of Mallory in Natural Born Killers and because she’s such an unreliable narrator, it’s not hard to imagine she’s equally culpable in Marlowe’s crimes. Still her childhood is basically a nightmare and its not a surprise she lets herself become show more enslaved by Marlowe. Any port in a storm.

By the end, you’re feeling just as confused and betrayed as Annie. Everywhere you look are people behaving badly and lying. It’s off-putting and not everything is wrapped up tightly. Loose ends abound and I wonder if we’ll see Annie Ophelia again sometime when her friend Ella finally shows. show less

I started this book with high expectations but slowly I'm afraid I became increasingly disengaged from the story and indeed the heroine. There's something immensely irritating about Annie Powers and I never felt I was allowed to get beneath the surface of her character. I think it's something to do with the fact that there's a lot of telling and not very much showing the reader what's going on in this book. Not only that, but so many different things are going on in so many different timeframes and to so many different people (who might or might not be real) that after a while I started skipping, especially towards the end.

There is a grain or two of a really great story here, however. It's just a shame that it's overwritten, lots of show more information keeps being repeated in different forms, and it goes on far too long. A good hundred pages could have been lost with no real dent in the plot.

That said, I did actually think the ending is one of the most powerful things about it. I've seen comments from readers who are very annoyed about the ending - and I can very well understand why. However, for me, the ending did at last give a real and solid glimpse into the heart of Annie Powers, and so felt in that sense very satisfying indeed. Just a shame the rest of the novel couldn't have been the same. show less

Hmmmm? Never read Lisa Unger until now, but this novel definitely has a "Dean Koontz" flavor to it---the pervading nightmare quality that leaves the reader unsure what is real, what is imagined. Really, at the end of it, I was almost ready for some ptsd therapy. This poor girl Ophelia (oka Annie) had been through so much trauma I don't know how she could possibly function afterwards, much less go on to lead a normal life. However, I thought that Lisa Unger must certainly have been subject to some suffering herself to speak with such authority ("Most of us don't live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what's going show more on around us, we're so busy time traveling.") All in all, not a bad little bang-bang whodunit. show less

An ordinary wife and mother, Annie Powers, is not so ordinary as she first appears. But then, neither is her husband who works in a company that does business in a post-9/11 world, Gray Powers perhaps offering his wife the unique assistance that allows a troubled young woman to create a different life after years of trauma. But this chance to start over, with Gray and daughter, Victory, on Florida's Gulf Coast isn't purchased without considerable cost. Gray's private enterprises facilitate his shielding of Annie and this is a bargain she is willing to make. Finally secure, even a little careless of late, Annie is suddenly overtaken by an eerie sense that she is being watched, that the impossible has happened and "he" has returned to show more claim her. She knows she is safe, that Gray has effectively erased the past, but it is all shattered in a moment in the soft repetition of a name, "Ophelia".

The major flaw with "Black Out" is how Lisa Unger structures the story. Unfortunately, she decides not to unfold the plot in a linear fashion. Instead she constantly jumps back and forth through time in an episodic manner, which prevents the storyline from gaining any true momentum. I also felt the plot was at times confusing, making it difficult for me to understand what was going on. The ending is similarly ambigious and perplexing, which led me to view this book with a certain amount of frustration. show less

This was a gripping thriller with so many twists and turns that I'm still struggling with what was real and what wasn't. At first I struggled with the three main time frames - the present, the recent past and the deep past, but once I had them worked out I was captivated.

Annie is a vulnerable protagonist. She is mentally fragile and suffers from a dissociative disorder. Throughout the book her horrific, abusive past is revealed and, although now happily married with a four-year old daughter, her life is suddenly disrupted as her past comes back to haunt her.

A wonderful psychological thriller that had me hooked from the start.

Lisa Unger has written some great books and she’s written some stinkers. BLACK OUT is somewhere in between.

Ophelia grew up with unloving parents. Her father was mostly absent, both physically and mentally, and her mother seemed too stupid and selfish to be able to love her. As a result, Ophelia became unhinged, mentally ill. And it got worse while she willingly and unwillingly accompanied a murderer through several states. She was traumatized and unable to save herself.

Now Ophelia is Annie. She is happily married and has a child. (Speaking of which, both Ophelia/Annie and her mother pick names for their children like most people pick names for their pets. Victory?) Her mental illness, seemingly, continues.

Because I love this type of show more book, mystery/suspense/thriller, I often must have a willing suspension of disbelief. But BLACK OUT asks for too much. Why were Ophelia/Annie and her husband so duped? This is never adequately explained, at least not enough to suit me.

Worse, though, are the loose ends: Ophelia/Annie’s friend Ella and the detective. Who was Ella? Why is the detective there and suddenly not? No answers, just possibilities. show less