by Jessica Schneider

Created on: June 27, 2009   Last Updated: June 28, 2009

American Taboo is one of those books to take a pass on; but the reasons are not due to some of the complaints I've read on Amazon. Many of the reviews are negative, claiming the writing to be poor. Now, I have learned that very often when "everyday people" claim something to be poorly written, they usually don't know what they are talking about.

And although I'm not claiming that this book is well written, I'm just saying it's not poorly written in the ways the reviewers think. First of all, many claim American Taboo to have multiple run on sentences. I read the entire book, and saw no such thing. It's just another example where readers cannot tell the difference between a run on sentence and a complex sentence, because anything above "See Jane Run" gets to be too much.

Yes, Weiss uses lots of commas, but so what? Ever hear of Proust? Anyway, I decided to read this because I know about as much of the Peace Corps as I do antique woodcarvings, which would be nil. The book is about the murder of a young woman named Deborah Gardner, who went to Tonga back in 1975, and who was stabbed 22 times by a psycho guy who supposedly had a crush on her. Many of the guys had crushes on her in fact, for she was what you'd call a 'hot chick', and, on top of that she even wrote bad poetry. In fact, there are large portions of the book even describing how attractive she was, which makes me wonder if she were a hag, would anyone care she was killed, at least enough to write/publish a book about it? (Because that's what the public/media cares about: attractive white women from well-off backgrounds. If you're a minority or poor; good luck to you).

Then the book goes into detail about how the Peace Corps tried to cover up the murder, and how, in the US, the story was kept hush-hush. The problem with the book is its lack of passion, for the text is more inert than anything else. There is too much banal description about superfluous things, such as the girl's funeral and her family background, as well as things that don't offer any insight into who she really was, for I never felt like I got to know Deb Gardner or what really made her unique, other than the fact she was murdered by a psychotic 'genius' and that she was good-looking.

Instead, to have been given a bit more background about the Peace Corps, and about the program, etc., as well as more insights into why they'd want to cover it up, rather than reading about her killer sitting in a jail cell attempting to starve himself, would have made for much more interesting reading. This story actually would have made a great subject for a non-fiction crime novel, (think In Cold Blood) but it doesn't read as that. (Had Truman Capote written it, it would have likely been great. But I'm afraid there's just not enough umpf there to call it that).

The publishers tried to promote American Taboo as some nail biting thriller, which it isn't, and nor is it literary. So it's neither. It's just passionless and forgettable.

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