The Kiss aka Daddy and Me

I don't know about you but a title like this had be running away at first. Even while reading it during lunch and on the train I purposefully hid the book's title while embarrassingly showing its pages with HUGE font. It just sounds like a less than Nora Roberts saad sad attempt at a romance novel. Only after reading the book do I recognize the importance of the title, but truthfully I still wouldn't have chosen that one- it just doesn't peak my curiousity. But the story oh what a story.

Delightfully indecent! Young Katie lives with the most dysfunctional of families. An overbearing disapproving mother and a manipulative grandmother guide her into a nervous bulimic lifestyle, while her minister father, who has been living with another family all her life comes in and our of her life until finally deciding to stay in and becoming dangerously close. And so begins their extended obsessive love affair with one another. A single kiss of the book's namesake sparks their truly tortured relationship. OK but the truth? I'm SO sick of these books of tortured past that lead to empowerment. I'm a cynic I get it but this book in particular was blah.

So many things I didn't like about this book. To be absolutely frank... she just sounds like another whiner. That is absolutely inappropriate to talk about her story in such a way I know, but I didn't find any range of emotions in this book. Truthfully I don't know if that makes it any less of a book but just personally it didn't do it for me. Too much whining... too much 'please feel bad for me'. Something about her detailing every moment of her sad 25 years of life bores me. But maybe that's just me I'm more easy to pity resilient characters that can look back on their experiences with at least a smirk. She's a great writer though and I enjoyed following her poetry as well as her story. It just didn't leave me exclaiming 'hallelujah everyone needs to read this', like I usually leave a good book.

But god twisted twisted story... not as twisted as the next book on my list In Youth is Pleasure recommended by John Waters himself. Now that's what I call twisted.