Inside
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3.5 • 51 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and selected as an Oprah's Book Club Summer Reading Pick, an Amazon.ca Best Book, and an iTunes Store Best Book
When Grace, a highly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man in the snowy woods who has failed to hang himself, her instinct to help immediately kicks in. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward.
At the same time, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace's ex-husband, a therapist as well, leaves the woman he's desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With a razor-sharp emotional intelligence, Inside poignantly explores the manifold dangers and imperatives of making ourselves available to, and indeed responsible for, those dearest to us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A trio of interlocked stories, Ohlin's bleak second novel shadows three broken people on the hunt for fulfillment who sabotage any true chance of finding it. Grace, an indiscriminately nurturing yet controlling therapist, falls hard for "Tug," a PTSD-afflicted stranger she discovers after a botched suicide attempt; with all the glaring red flags Ohlin plants, it's a wonder Grace doesn't see his second attempt this one successful coming. Mitch, Grace's brooding ex-husband, takes up with an exacting beauty far beyond his league; surprisingly to him, if not to readers, she shacks up with her gynecologist after Mitch goes away on business. And then there's the morally vapid Annie, a former cutter and one of Grace's ex-patients, who abandons her banal New York life to pursue stardom via copious sexual conquests in Hollywood; the glamorous lifestyle, of course, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Some juicy side plots such as the saga involving the pregnant homeless runaway who ingratiates herself with Annie aren't given enough room to breathe, perhaps due to Ohlin's flair for crafting emotionally complex short stories that are often left open-ended. Nonetheless, the demonstrated chasm between her characters' intentions and actions and what inevitably transpires is, perhaps like life, what makes this book so voluminous and so empty at the same time.
Customer Reviews
Page-turner
I had a hard time putting this book down. Indeed, none of the characters are 100% likeable, but the stories read easily and the emotions are very real.
Awful
The writing style is choppy, the dialogue reads like a bad play, and the protagonist is completely unlikable. I had to force myself to keep going and give it a chance, continuously hoping it would get better, but I ended up wasting my time - don't waste yours.