The Innocent's Story

I tend to grab a whole bunch of books when I'm at the library, mostly either because I like the author or because the cover interests me. I picked up this thing called The Innocent's Story by Nicky Singer because the cover looked a little creepy. I knew nothing about it until I read it, because I don't read blurbs anymore as they often give away entirely too much plot to make me happy.

Here's a link to what the Manchester Book Award website has to say about the book:

http://www.manchesterbookaward.com/finalist/74/

Now for what I thought of it. Pure torture from start to finish. Unrelenting dreariness and condescension. At the back the author says she wrote it as a reaction to 9/11 and that publishing it was difficult. Possibly because it's so horrible? I know many people who wrote things as a reaction to the attacks that occurred that September but most of us were smart enough to know that publishing them was a bad idea. (My own story was about a woman who is supposed to meet her mother and her daughter at the WTC and is several hours away when the attack happens and in the end wanders around New York, nearly catatonic with grief, unable to do anything more than pick up memorials that have come unstuck from the walls and putting them back up again. It wasn't bad but I wouldn't want to inflict it on anyone else.)

The Innocent's Story is told from the POV of a 13 year old girl who is killed in a bomb in a train station. But she doesn't move on, she floats around and inspects things and eventually ends up in the brain of the man who killed her, who just happens to be immortal. We meet the mother of the man behind the plots who says that everyone is responsible for the attacks, and makes a case for why she thinks this way. The worst part for me is when the dead girl goes into the brain of the "mastermind" and it's just pretty much blank. He doesn't think or feel much and he can't see white people, he just sees blobs or whatever.

What is the author trying to say? If the point of the book was to explore the motivations of suicide bombers why make them into robots or whatever? I don't get it.