Straight

Here is the latest book my husband and I read together. It follows a guy whose brother passes away suddenly, leaving him to find the pieces of a couple of puzzles that bring him close to death.

My husband enjoyed this one because it was not easy to guess how everything happened and who did what and where and why. He thought it was entertaining.

I have to agree with him on both points. Compared to other books that we have read together in the past, this was not so boring and all of the steps to solving the mysteries were not made so blatant.

The thing I wanted to touch on was how as we were reading, I was getting the vibes that this was written by a man, written with the demographic to be for men. This book was written in the 70s, and at first I was not getting that feeling, but toward the end was when I started noticing. I think it is the way Francis writes; there is not a whole of detail in things, it stays simple and flows action to action. Nothing wrong with that, I just do not see that in women’s writing. Everyone writes differently, but I have seen this kind of writing predominantly with men. It was a nice change.

I will say that I was expecting from the reading in the beginning that it was going to grow into something way bigger than it really did by the end. When I think about it now, I am a little disappointed by that. I think that goes to show how much action and mystery society wants in its media. Movies, shows, books, etc; what seemed so big then seems smaller now.

I would recommend this book overall, I feel like a lot of people would find Straight and probably other books by Dick Francis entertaining and just a good read all around. You can find it here.

8/10