Snapshot Book Review: The Solitude of Prime Numbers

The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What this book needed was redemption.

The novel is an odd love story of self-betrayal and disappointment. Giordano does a fantastic job of keeping the reader's interest be creating characters just unique enough to intrigue us and just aloof enough to keep us turning the pages. However, enough sad and disturbing choices are made that halfway through the book, what we are reading for is redemption. What we want is an "aha" moment and at least a small flicker of hope that "everything will be okay."

Unfortunately, Giordano does not offer us that. By the three-quarter mark in this novel, I realized that no salvation was going to come to either of the main characters. Were Giordano's writing not so lyrical and therefore captivating (and were I not so stubbornly hopeful), I would have put the book down and picked up something else. However, I dutifully read through to the end, and was just as disappointed as I had expected. It's a shame, because as a reader, you start out feeling sympathetic toward Alice and Mattia. By the end, though, you are so fed up that you have no qualms leaving them to their lonely, self-destructive ways. Like in counseling, if neither one wants to get better, then there's no use trying to help them...or in this case, read about them.
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