Caught Author: Visit Amazon's Lisa Moore Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0802122124 | Format: EPUB
Caught Description
Amazon.com Review
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, February 2014: At the risk of annoying those who hate literary mashups, I’m declaring Caught to be “Huck Finn meets Les Miserables.” As those are two of my formative reading experiences, that’s no small statement. And this is no small book. On page one, the likeably misguided Daniel Slaney has just escaped a Canadian prison, where he’d been held on pot-running charges. Through the story of Slaney’s struggle to remain free, we soon learn that he’s already, in many ways, caught. Caught in a manipulative relationship with his childhood friend Hearn; caught in his doomed love for the women he left behind, and the child who’s not his. Other characters are similarly caged by circumstance, particularly the wounded, dogged detective Patterson, who pursues Slaney across Canada, to Columbia and Mexico, all the while admiring, even envying Slaney’s bravado attempt at freedom. They know each other, the hunter and his prey. They’re both caught in the lives they’ve chosen. Toward the end of this subtly brilliant and propulsive novel, Slaney is asked whether it’s best to just do the things he’s blamed for. Slaney’s reply: “I did them from the start.” There’s so much energy, wit, smarts and heart in Moore’s writing, though nothing feels forced or contrived. I enjoyed so many small, crystalline moments--sometimes tense, sometimes heart-rending--that made me sit back and think, “Wow.” (Flipping through my review copy, I see “Nice!” scribbled in the margins a dozen times.) Already an award-winner in Canada, Caught is captivating. --Neal Thompson
From Booklist
Time spent in prison has done nothing to quell David Slaney’s desire to deal drugs. So when he breaks out of the slammer, the 25-year-old’s number-one goal is not to revel in his newfound freedom but rather to track down his old business partner, Hearn, and get back in the marijuana game. It’s not as easy as he had thought. His manic journey across Canada forces him to adopt numerous guises to avoid getting caught. Alas, there is at least one person he wishes he could “catch”: his ex-lover Jennifer, who knew his shady history better than anyone else and loved him all the same. The dream of a thriving pot business sends Slaney sailing to Mexico and Colombia, where there’s no shortage of rough seas. Will his ambition and hubris bring him riches or bring him down? Moore (February, 2010) steadily amps up the suspense in a cat-and-mouse chase between Slaney and Hearn and a vigilant detective; her breathless plot loses a little momentum at the end, but this is still an entertaining thriller with an engaging cast. --Allison Block
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- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (February 4, 2014)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0802122124
- ISBN-13: 978-0802122124
- Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
“Caught,” by Lisa Moore, is a stunning novel of piercing psychological depth and realism. It literally took my breath away. This is the first novel I’ve read by Moore, but I can easily see why she won the 2013 Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award, one of Canada’s major literary honors. In conferring that prize on the whole of Moore’s literary work, the jury noted that she was “a writer of startling originality and compelling emotional truth.” In my opinion, that short phrase aptly and succinctly captures this author’s exceptional literary gift.
“Caught” is an insightful novel constructed around the theme of trust, truth, and deception. All the main and secondary characters are regular, everyday type of people portrayed with stark emotional honesty and authenticity; the world they inhabit is one of enigmatic moral ambiguities. We recognize that world as our own and it startles us because we begin to see how dangerous and unpredictable it can be. Anything can happen. Trust is fickle. Control is fiction. Fate is something we eventually must accept…and not let it turn us bitter or make us feel entitled.
The publisher’s blurb on the back of the novel is trying to market this book as some kind of a literary prison-break suspense thriller. All that’s true, but it is not necessarily encouraging the right audience. Sure, the novel is compelling with a pace that pushes the reader through the pages eager to find out what’s going to happen to the likable main character. Sure, the main character is very young, perceptive, crafty, and likable—a modern-day Billy the Kid—but what drives this book is not the action, but the inner motivations behind those actions. It’s not a genre suspense thriller; it’s a profound literary psychological drama….
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