'The Three Lives of Richie O'Malley'

★★★

I Liked It...

​...but the narrative-type writing caused it to drone on at times. ​Not that it wasn't an interesting story, but a little more dialogue would have certainly broken up the monotony of the narrative. 

For me, when I read, I do so as if I'm watching a movie. Now imagine watching a movie where the characters move about on the screen, but all you hear is the narrator relaying the story, with the occasional "Oh, you've not met my friend, Juan" thrown in by one of those characters. Simply put, you want more from your characters.

Overall, the story was written well, but there were a few times when I was tripped up by a missing word (i.e. "...stole the gun, sliding into his pants." should've been "sliding it into his pants"), and at times the author would use a hyphen when he should have used an em dash. Why is this important? Because a hyphen is meant to join compound words, whereas an em dash is meant to separate phrases (similar to a colon). They aren't meant to be interchangeable or it can throw off the flow. For example, I'm reading along and stumble. I re-read the following sentence four times because it's not making sense to me:
     "He lay there awake all night thinking about the gun-terrified the cops would find...".

​At first I thought the word "the" was an accidental input and it should be "gun-terrified cops", but that didn't make sense. I kept re-reading trying to decipher the sentence. Then I realized it should have been "...all night thinking about the gun--terrified...". All that to say that while the book was written well, there were small mistakes that threw off the flow of the story.

Overall, I liked the book and enjoyed following Richie along, as told by the narrator (for the most part).