I wouldn’t have picked up Rock, Paper, Scissors (2021) by Alice Feeney on my own, because I don’t usually gravitate to twisty domestic thrillers, but it was an acceptable book group selection.
Told in alternating first person perspective, Mr. and Mrs. Wright are headed for a weekend away in Scotland at a converted chapel, driving in a blinding snowstorm. Adam is a bestselling author and is married to Amelia, who works in an animal shelter. They don’t have kids but adopted a black lab named Bob. Married for a while, they’ve been becoming annoyed with each other. The most interesting thing is that Adam has face blindness–he cannot recognize people’s faces, even those he is close to, such as his wife, or writing mentor.
Right off the bat, Feeney makes the reader unsure of which partner is the good person and which the bad–neither are very likeable and it seems like both might take the opportunity to rid themselves of this marriage while they are in the middle of nowhere in a snowstorm.
But it wasn’t always this way. Feeney also inserts letters that are written to Adam by his wife in the past, one each year for their anniversary, and they seemed reasonably happy, especially as Adam became more successful as a writer.
Without giving any spoilers, I was definitely surprised as I read, and I was intrigued and wanted to find out how it ended. The face blindness led to some interesting situations I hadn’t before considered. I was glad that I read it, but I really didn’t like the characters. The setting–an old chapel converted into a house, complete with spooky cellar, a bell tower, and hidden rooms–in the Scottish Highlands, might have been the best aspect of the book.
There was no explicit anti-fatness, but there were some scenes where the author wrote Adam’s distaste at the appearance and demeanor of a store clerk that could be read as anti-fat. Nevertheless, since Feeney didn’t describe the body size of the clerk, I’ll consider it weight-neutral.
Reading While Fat 