Missing CD - In Zanesville

In Zanesville
by Jo Ann Beard

There are of course different writing styles an author can use for a novel.  People have their favorites and sometimes one style will satisfy more than another.  "In Zanesville"  is the story of a family as seen through the eyes of a 14 year old girl.  Now I have read books like this before and they generally do keep my interest, just because people are all different and it is amazing to look into others lives.

On the other hand, this book had no real plot or purpose to carry the reader along.  Rather, it is the timeline of life that carries the reader along - going from day to day, from one life incident to the next.  Since there is no definite story to complete by the end of the book, one wonders how the book will end.  (Keep wondering!)  Certainly no offense intended for the author. I am certainly not educated enough to be a literary critic.

I write this perspective after the fact, so let me tell you what happened.  When I started the seventh and last CD, I discovered that I had heard it before.  The seventh CD, although labelled correctly, was actually a duplicate of the fifth CD.  Ordinarily this would have bothered me, but in this case, I was content to let the story end there and was not overly concerned with the contents of CD 7.  This attitude kind of surprised me.  With many other books there is still a lot of plot to resolve on the last CD and you would be scrambling hard to find another copy.

Oh well, just an observation.