Review: The ultimate in voyeurism
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 15, 2014
Katie catches a taxi and quickly finds an iPhone left in the back seat by the previous occupant. At first thought, she wants to hand it to the driver to put in the lost and found, but her curiosity gets the best of her and she quickly decides to see what secrets the phone holds. Besides, she has wanted an iPhone for a while…if the previous owner didn’t care enough to watch after the phone, Katie would be more than happy to.Textual Encounters is an incredibly fast, easy read. It is told mainly in the format of text messages sent back and forth between Christine and Jake. Katie returns home and begins to read the conversation between the two strangers, which all started with a text sent to the wrong person. What happens over the course of a couple of months, is a long, sordid, sexual affair between two very dysfunctional people. Christine is obviously keeping secrets, and Jake seems to be looking for more than Christine is willing, or able, to give him.Reading Textual Encounters feels intimately voyeuristic. It also feels as though we the reader, much like Katie, don’t get the whole story, because we don’t have a narrator that gives us what is going on between the text sessions. This is a very effective plot device, however the jury is still out whether or not I like it. It leaves so much to the imagination that sometimes it feels like too much. There is little room for character development because the characters aren’t really present, per se. We learn a little about Katie, but not really enough to come to any conclusions about her, especially about what her motives are at the end of the book.I give Textual Encounters four stars, based on the originality alone. There have been several well-known books that have used emails or text messages as a part of the narrative, but this is the first time I have read a work based mostly on texts alone. Unfortunately I am the type of person that requires a lot of depth, not only of the characters, but also of the storyline, and I feel that because of the way this story is told, that depth is just lacking. Hopefully in the next installment, Textual Encounters 2, we’ll learn more about each of the players.