Despite Marc Raabe’s two previous thrillers, Cut and The Shock, garnering decidedly mixed reviews I nevertheless had high expectations from what is a decent, if not original, premise of the past rearing its ugly head in the life of the central character. Sadly, however, Homesick is not the “fast-paced and addictive thriller” that the blurb promises and instead I found it barely competent with a disjointed style of writing and leaps of logic making for a story that has the potential to confuse and tends to incoherence. Together with overextended moments of melodrama in a plot where the identity of the bad guy becomes blatantly obvious with a quarter of the book remaining, the inexplicable and unsympathetic behaviour of the characters confounded me. Whilst I do not always warm to characters in thrillers I at least hope to understand their actions and for me, the behaviour of protagonist, Jesse Berg, was rather primal with frequent recourse to gratuitous violence and a tendency to see women as sex objects.
Homesick got off to a rather confusing start for me with several strands of the story never quite merging into a cohesive whole quite simply because far too many elements were introduced all at once. Protagonist and forty-five-year-old doctor, Jesse Berg, wakes up from a recurring nightmare in his flat in Berlin with his eight-year-old daughter Isabelle (Isa) staying overnight for the first time. From there Marc Raabe gives a rapid fire introduction of Jesse’s past with the accident at the age of thirteen that left him with focal retrograde amnesia and no memory of the past that came before, through to his time at the Adlershof Children’s Home and marriage and divorce from fellow resident, Sandra.
Homesick got off to a rather confusing start for me with several strands of the story never quite merging into a cohesive whole quite simply because far too many elements were introduced all at once. Protagonist and forty-five-year-old doctor, Jesse Berg, wakes up from a recurring nightmare in his flat in Berlin with his eight-year-old daughter Isabelle (Isa) staying overnight for the first time. From there Marc Raabe gives a rapid fire introduction of Jesse’s past with the accident at the age of thirteen that left him with focal retrograde amnesia and no memory of the past that came before, through to his time at the Adlershof Children’s Home and marriage and divorce from fellow resident, Sandra.