Craigslist Confessional

Imagine a book, sort of a cross between Chicken Soup for the Soul (remember those?) and Jerry Springer (also, remember him?), part inspirational journey part voyeuristic peek into some pretty unfortunate and/or unsavory lives. You have a lot of “awww” moments reading the book, but you also have some guilty moments where you wish you hadn't pulled that curtain aside and saw what you've just seen. That sort of grey area between journey and train wreck is where this book falls, I think.

I don't know, I started out really liking this book's premise and getting sucked into the people's stories. There's some real heartbreakers here, particularly from my point of view with a husband who's also a veteran. But somewhere around the middle of the book I think I just started feeling fatigue, like it was just too much gossip, too raw of feelings, too intimate a look into these people's lives. I made it through the rest of the book, but I felt guilty doing so. The author has an entire introduction where she makes it a point to state that all of these stories were related to her freely, and with the full knowledge that they may be used in her book, but I still can't help but feel like these are private stories that mean more to their respective tellers/families than us, a random outsider reading a book.

I know there's a lot of contention here in the reviews about the author basically profiting on someone else's story, and I'm not going to comment on that here. Strictly speaking about the book itself, it just feels too....private. Sometimes we don't really need to hear the full story about your neighbor. That guilty pleasure gossip is still making you feel guilty because it's something you're not meant to hear. I feel like that's true here.

I received a copy of this book free through Goodreads Giveaways.