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Title: Painful
Review: Sara Gruen has invented a character so inadequate, insensitive and incompetent, that it defies credulity to accept that this 'heroine' has enough insight to narrate a first person account of her ridiculously tenuous hold on reality. She does not cook or clean or parent her daughter or help her mother care for her desperately ill father. She takes on the management of the stable business, but does not even get to know her employees. She expects sympathy from her audience, as she whines or screams through page after page. I actually felt sympathy for the fictional people with whom this fictional woman interacted, until I decided that life was too short to spend another moment on this tale. The death of her father was where I reached the end of my tolerance for this book. I had enjoyed Water for Elephants very much, and was sorely disappointed in this attempt to create a story around horses, and people who like them.
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