A review by meghan111
Disobedience by Jane Hamilton

2.0

A teenage boy named Henry reads his mom's email and finds out she's having an affair, then creepily keeps secretly reading her email for months and months, printing out messages as an archive, and just generally creeping it up and obsessing about how her affair relates to him. His mom at one point goes to a tarot reader and emails a friend about how the reader told her that Henry and she were married in a past life, and now they're mother and son. Henry reads that email, of course, and thinks disturbing thoughts about his mom's affair. He refers to her variously as Beth, Liza, and Mrs. Shaw in his narration. Nothing really happens - Henry, the teenage boy, living in an upscale Chicago neighborhood, is described as smart and amiable, someone who does what's expected of him. His younger sister is the only character with any life: a butch girl obsessed with Civil War reenactments. This brings me to the heart of my irritation, which is that the mom is completely upset throughout the whole novel because her daughter wants to be a boy in Civil War reenactments. She is described as profoundly torn up inside that her daughter is not interested in feminine things or in wearing dresses, but the mom is such a poorly drawn character that it doesn't make sense that she would be upset, and then there's a climactic incident that ends with the daughter giving up on her obsession with the Civil War.

Horribly self-important and serious-minded, too literary, the description of a boy poisoning himself slowly by being unable to stop invading his mother's privacy doesn't ever come to life on the page - he's kind of a cipher who doesn't suffer consequences, and his mom is much the same.