Review: Good Premise/Poor Execution
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 24, 2014
New York investigative reporter, Charlie Kee, returns to his family's Texas roots for the funeral of his seventeen-year-old cousin.  It's been ruled a suicide, but Charlie's investigative instincts won't rest.  Review of the autopsy and interviews with the police chief and other potential witnesses to that night reveal inconsistencies that would never pass muster in the city.  But small-town secrets and prejudices have deep roots growing beneath the surface.The premise of this novel intrigued me.  It had the elements of heartache, loss, and deep-seated emotions that offered the potential to stir my own.However, the execution hit all of my buttons and left me feeling quite frustrated.  Point-of-view was all over the place - one paragraph I noticed switched POV three times - and so many random and inconsequential characters took POV center stage that before I even finished a third of the novel I wanted to stop reading.The POV problems also affected how I saw the characters.  Character reactions swung so sharply at times nearly every single character almost seemed bipolar.  Seemed waaay over the top, which made them feel more like caricatures of the worst kinds of humanity.Too much telling instead of showing dragged the pacing down, not to mention the numerous side stories that had absolutely nothing to do with the main story arc.  We had Ann and Paul, Lisa and her mother with Lisa's impending wedding, and countless other situations that made me keep going HUH?  The only thing Ann really had to do with the story was that she served as a counselor at the school.  I could understand all of that, but I didn't need to see her strip down in a public pond while she was being seduced by her ex-boyfriend.  If all of these side stories were removed, this would really help tighten the novel, thereby increasing the pacing drastically and keeping to the main story arc of Charlie trying to discern what happened to his cousin.It would also take an over-long book and cut it nearly in half - in my opinion a necessary sacrifice.In the end, the characters for whom I was supposed to feel some empathy left me with a bitter taste in my mouth because they ended up behaving in the most despicable ways and committing acts even the bad guys might not - Charlie and his uncle included.  Their atrocious acts of vengeance (even after discovering the truth) made whatever minute sympathies I felt for the childhood flashbacks obsolete.  The protagonists turned into the antagonists.It pains me, but I can give The Day the Tigers Broke Free only one and a half stars - the half star being for the promising premise.