It was an odd book this week.

In Michelle Huneven’s novel, Blame, the heroine slips into the story through a side door while I’m pretty sure the story is about somebody else.

But no, it’s about Patsy MacLemoore, a party-girl college professor in southern California. The alcohol gets out of hand and one day, Patsy wakes up from a blackout and learns that she hit two Jehovah’s Witnesses with her car.

And we follow Patsy to jail.

There are no peaks and valleys in the story. There is no grand build-up to any killer scene (no pun intended). There is no tension, no more than in an ordinary week. The author even gives away a huge story twist right in the jacket copy. Then again, maybe that’s tension right there: a reader waiting a couple hundred pages to see how this twist manages to drop into the plot.

Mostly, we stroll along with Patsy — into jail, out of jail, into AA meetings, into relationships, into middle age. It’s pleasant, but once it becomes clear that the road through Huneven’s book is fairly smooth and flat, you too may wish Patsy could walk by some Stonehenge-like surfboard (this being California and all), and find herself whisked back to the days of the Spanish missions. Or something.

Photo credit: djwtwo on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC-SA