Name: Wreck and Order
ISBN: 9781101903261

Hannah Tennant-Moore

Sick of her abusive boyfriend and dead-end newspaper job, Elsie sets out for adventure, traveling from California to Brooklyn to Sri Lanka in search of experiences and human connections to help fill the perceived void in her life.

A Novel

Wreck and Order

shelby mosel

** spoiler alert **
           I really wanted to like this book. I entered in a give away and won it. I just kept expecting the character to develop and become...a better more interesting person? But it just never happened.

Nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize Nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize A boldly candid, raw portrait of a young woman's search for meaning and purpose in an indifferent world Purposefully aimless, self-destructive, and impulsively in and out of love, Elsie is a young woman who feels lost. She's in a tumultuous relationship, is stuck in a dead-end job, and has a relentless, sharp intelligence that’s at odds with her many bad decisions. When her initial attempts to improve her life go awry, Elsie decides that a dramatic change is the only solution. While traveling through Paris and Sri Lanka, Elsie meets people who challenge and provoke her towards the change she is seeking, but ultimately she must still come face-to-face with herself. Whole-hearted, fiercely honest and inexorably human, Wreck and Order is a stirring debut novel that, in mirroring one young woman's dizzying quest for answers, illuminates the important questions that drive us all.

Eleanor Luhar

I received an advanced reader's copy of this book from Blogging for Books in return for my honest review. I downloaded the book via NetGalley.

I started this book nearly a month ago - a month! It definitely isn't the kind of book I would usually go for, but hey, it's good to try something new.

This is definitely an honest book. Elsie, having grown up on her father's money, is trying to find happiness. She befriends Suriya in Sri Lanka, and even ties out the Buddhist monks' way of life. But all she ever seems to think about is, quite honestly, sex. She connects everything that happens to her to some kind of sexual act or emotion achieved through a sexual relationship. Like I said, Wreck and Order is extremely honest. Perhaps a bit too honest at times.

Elsie is trying to find her place in the world. That is a great start for a book. But I just didn't get into this - I wasn't emotionally attached to Elsie at all, and I couldn't really relate to her. I got more than a bit fed up of all the sexual references pretty early on.

It doesn't even seem to be in chronological order. Okay, not all books are, but I just kept getting so lost in this! One minute she's alone in Sri Lanka, the next she's remembering her time with her kind-of-boyfriend, and then she's comparing it all to her hellish time in Paris... I just could not keep up.

There was no real hook or plot in this novel either. Elsie goes here, she meets them, she does this. The end.

Speaking of the end, what is going on there?! I tried to turn to the next page repeatedly, not realising the book had even finished. A bit of a dead end in my opinion, rather disappointing.

I try not to say that I don't like a book. I never stop reading part-way through. But I have struggled with both of these things with Wreck and Order. Perhaps it just isn't my kind of novel. Perhaps it was a bit too sexual. Perhaps it just didn't have a gripping storyline and lacked the development that readers love so much. I'm giving this 2.5 stars; the writing is very good in places, the idea is there, but it just doesn't fit together quite right.

Wreck and Order A Novel

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