text: The setting of this book is beautiful, exotic, and interesting. The author, unfortunately, does nothing to take advantage of this. I am shocked that this book could possibly have won a National Book Award. It must mean that either the award itself is meaningless, or that there were some truly dreadful books out that year -- which I doubt. The topic of this book could have been more ably handled by just about anyone else, as far as I am concerned. I can't imagine it being done worse! Tuck's writing style -- short vignettes or episodes, one after another -- is terribly ineffective and disjointed. I felt completely detached from all of the characters. I didn't feel like I gained any understanding of who they were, and was unmoved when they died or otherwise encountered tragedies. Another thing that completely irritated me were Tuck's sexual references. Throughout the novel, Tuck would end her lame vignettes with one or two sentences mentioning some crass sexual encounter (a finger inserted in an unmentionable place or a character participating in a masturbating contest, for example). These sentences seem to be thrown in just to shock or perhaps to intrigue the reader; all they did was gross me out. They were written in such a way that they seemed to have been written by a teenage boy, not an adult woman trying to tell a compelling story. I don't know what Tuck was trying to do in this novel. I think she has failed to write anything that succeeds on any level: It is not entertaining. It is not profound. It is not educational. It is not beautiful. At only 248 pages, I can't say it was even a quick read. Utterly forgettable, once you get past the irritation of having wasted your time reading it.
  