Losing Clementine

" I threw the teapot out the window.

It plummeted three floors and shattered into a hundred white porcelain pieces right behind Mrs. Epstein, who I had never much liked anyway.

"Hey!" she yelled up at me.

"Sorry," I said, hanging half my upper body over the sill. Then I turned back inside, grabbed half a dozen teacups, and dumped those out too.

I wasn't that sorry.

Crash. Crash-crash. Crash-crash-crash.

It was very satisfying.

"Have you lost your mind?" Mrs. Epstein screamed, dancing around in her sensible shoes to avoid flying debris.

"Yes," I said and used half my body weight to shove the sash back down.

It would've been more satisfying to slam it, but fifty years of paint made that impossible. Unfortunate. I was really into doing things that were satisfying at the moment. I had, just that afternoon fired my shrink. When you've really and truly decided to kill yourself, what's the point of a shrink?" (pg 1-2)

In the novel, Losing Clementine by Ashley Ream, the main character Clementine has decided that she is done with life. As the book chapters are divided into the days remaining like a countdown til her demise, she attempts to put her affairs in order and of course, research the best possible way for her suicide. She is an artist that truly is living on impulse, doing whatever strikes her fancy at that possible moment from order every conceivable entree at her local Indian restaurant, to flushing her prescription drugs, to finding a home for her cat Chuckles, by placing an advertisement in the local paper much like a single's ad. There are some quirky things she does that engages the reader but all in all I think too much gets lost in the storytelling.

There are descriptive sex scenes that carry the reader too far graphically into the act itself, lots of profanity, and just the notion itself that suicide is the answer for any of life's problems doesn't ring clear to me. I fear that this would encourage people in a way that I don't feel most of my readers would appreciate the content. It's disappointing because I really thought this would be a great story but other's may enjoy it nonetheless. I received this book compliments of William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins Publishers for my honest review and can honestly only rate it a 3 out of 5 stars.

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Losing Clementine by Ashley Ream