Unhinge

Victoria, a patient at a mental hospital in present-day Falls Church, Va., is convinced that recovering her lost memories from the last few years will allow her to leave the institution she has grown to hate. Her therapist shows her pictures from the missing years, and as Victoria’s memories reawaken, she begins to remember the way her marriage turned into an abusive nightmare and how it led her to the hospital. The situations described are traumatic ones, but Read (Unravel) creates characters so lacking in dimension that it is difficult to feel anything for them or to believe the highly improbable story that begins to unfold. This tendency toward caricature is particularly harmful when it comes to Victoria’s fellow patients, whose behaviors are stereotypical when the characters are not otherwise invisible or used as a backdrop to bland Victoria’s dramas. This clichéd and tedious novel does not deliver as either a romance or a thriller. [em]Agent: Amy Tannenbaum, Jane Rotrosen Agency. (Jan.) [/em]