A Little Less Than Kind

Let me start out by saying that the description here on LT (and Amazon) is too brief and doesn’t indicate the direction the story takes. It is ostensibly a revenge tale, but that’s just the surface. It is more of a psychological study of a person in crisis. An interesting book, but one that left me feeling unsatisfied and with too many unanswered questions.


There isn’t a lot of background on Ladd and there’s no contrasting action or behavior so it’s a little difficult to understand if he’s always been a psychopath or not. Dialog is cryptic and it isn’t heavy on action so it takes a little while for the reader to realize about Ladd. But because of the description, I kept waiting for some justification. None came and by the show more first (and physical) attack on Felicia, any sympathy I might have still had evaporated. Later for absolutely no reason he deliberately lies to some people coming to visit Felicia’s father that he sexually abuses her. There is no framing for this and he doesn’t care when she disappears and is thought to have committed suicide. He only has “friends” so long as they are useful and willing to be manipulated. He is dissatisfied with his life and looks for amusement in setting people up. The only reason he tolerates his mother is because she gives him the pity he needs; she is blind to his faults. His disregard for everyone’s humanity is a classic sociopath trait.

Another is that as the evidence mounts that Ladd’s father died a natural death, he refuses to believe it. Instead he cries conspiracy and cover up at every turn - everyone is his enemy. Nobody can convince him that his stepfather is innocent and it isn’t until the very end to we understand why Ladd suspected him in the first place. It was a total misunderstanding of a note in his father’s date book. Had he had any knowledge of, or a real relationship with, his father he would have known what it meant.

That’s another aspect that doesn’t make much sense. Ladd is hell bent on proving David guilty of murder and making his mother miserable for having married him on the rebound, but since he and his father seem to have had nothing to do with each other, it’s really strange. In the end people theorize that it was because he hated his molly-coddling mother that he went on this campaign, but nobody really knows and Ladd isn’t saying. Instead, after being an aggressive asshole for the whole book, he meekly goes off to a mental hospital and calls David ‘dad’.

The style is a little stilted and Ladd’s mother Abby is limp and dependent. She continually begs/commands David to “never leave me”. She’s neurotic and completely under her son’s thumb. Felicity comes off a little better as a character, but the men around her take extreme measures to protect and shelter her so that it’s a little hard to feel any fear for her since she isn’t allowed to feel it herself. I hoped she’d take more of a stand than she did, but at least she had some agency. show less