Fractured and The Murder Game by Catherine McKenzie : joint review.

These novels belong to one of the genres that most bookworms love: a story within a story. Catherine Mckenzie wrote The Murder Game in 2007 under the pseudonym Julie Apple but didn’t publish it. Then in 2015 came up with the idea of Fractured, a book about the life of that fictional writer .

 In Fractured we learn that being a famous novelist is not as much fun and one may think and that certainly suburbian neighbourhoods are by no means friendly and trouble-free, at least for Julie Apple. The  novel is narrated from different points of views and the plot takes place at different times which makes it much more interesting. But what really attracted me was the possibility of also reading that first novel which the author published later. 

The Murder Game is based on  the possibility of a perfect murder and inspired by the experiences of the author at McGill Law Faculty. This is quite a controversial topic but the moral dilemma is not addressed in the novel at all.We know from the very beginning who the murderer is and as the plot unfolds we learn the motive. The book also focuses on the relationships of a group of friends attending law school and the romantic affair between the main character and  her very unromantic boyfriend.

I don’t know if it is better to read Fractured and then The Murder Game, as I did , or the other way around. However, I recommend reading both novels, even if I found Fractured more appealing, perhaps because the author was much more experienced when she wrote it.

Fractured made me think about how writers react to negative reviews and comments and I felt guilty as sin because of the negative reviews I have written. I guess nowadays it  is incredibly harder than before to be a writer and you really need to grow a thick skin to be able to read everyday comments by people like me, who just read for the sake of it and feel free to say what they please afterwards. One of my New Year’s Resolutions will be to think twice before making a negative comment.