Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French

This book took me 4.5 months to read.

 

77 year old Marylou decides to kill the doctor who she blames for the premature death of her daughter. Marylou was given radioactive material while she was pregnant as part of a secret government and her daughter died at 8 from cancer. So 50 years later Marylou hunts down the doctor only to find he has dementia and lives with his daughter's family. Marylou instead plans to cause destruction there. However, the family has a bunch of issues already and they all end up saving each other.

 

This book was billed as a dark comedy so I picked it up. That is not what this book is at all. It is a mess. The first chapter was the best, that was the one that set up Marylou's backstory. Let's dig into the Doctor's family real quick. We have a husband who is flirting with having an affair with a lady from grad school, and is obsessed with hurricanes. They don't live an a hurricane area and all discussion of his time in grad school feels unrealistic. The wife is crippled by her mother leaving when she was like 2 or 3, and this apparently only started showing up in the last few years, but is now obsessed with going to college with her oldest daughter and has let herself go.  Two of the 3 children have Asperger's, though it's nothing like Asperger's, its more like they kindergartners with love interests.  The youngest child just doesn't seem to have human priorities or reactions to the events that unfold in this book. 

 

I was really iffy about this book when they described a teen girl as a "he/she", and it just kept getting worse and worse. The only thing this book did well was setting up the groundwork for the events that take place at the end. That being said they were pretty bad plot choices but they weren't completely out of the blue.