I’ve always enjoyed Lisa Scottoline’s books. There’s nothing I like more than a return to Rosato & Associates to see what scrapes the spunky lady lawyers are trying to escape. What I’ve realized in reading Scottoline’s stand alone, Save Me, is that what I like about her works are the characters. I can suspend disbelief with some of the plots in her series because I genuinely enjoy the characters and feel like I know them. The lack of character development in Rose McKenna made it a difficult and unbelievable book to get through.
Rose McKenna is helping out at her daughter’s school as the “lunch mom” when an explosion rocks the lunch room and she suddenly has to decide whether to try to save her daughter (who’s locked herself in the bathroom) or save a few of her daughter’s classmates (whose teasing is the reason the daughter, Melly, is in the bathroom). Although she ends up helping the classmates to the hallway and THEN rescuing Melly, she gets vilified by the parents and media when one of the students ends up seriously injured and in a coma. Make sense?
Oh, there’s much more. How about a conspiracy to blow up the lunchroom? An accidental death that occurred years ago? A corrupt senator? Lisa Scottoline throws so much at the reader that what starts out as an interesting moral dilemma swiftly turns into a hodgepodge of overused plots. And really, all that I could’ve endured if I had even a shred of empathy for Rose. But it was hard to root for her when she constantly second guessed herself and her decisions. Instead of questioning if she made the right decision during the lunchroom explosion she should have been questioning why she’d leave her daughter, who’d just suffered a severe trauma, overnight in the hospital. She goes from being “supermom” in the first half of the book to being “amateur sleuth” in the second – a complete stretch of the imagination – even for me.
~ Linette
When the story gives way to mystery, I became extremely excited as it added to the drama of the township, however, things began to become a little far-fetched as it progressed. For instance, the entire story takes place within one week and Rose comes upon all the conclusions on her own. While I guess this could happen, the chances of this being real begin to diminish, and so I can see where many readers may have lost fervor when reading-taking a story that could be real, and then setting it outside reality, tends to have this effect. Although I enjoyed the story on the whole.
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