Death in Her Hands: A Novel Kindle Edition

I was so excited by the premise of this book when I pre-ordered it. I expected weird, but I also expected a story. With the exception of two somewhat creepy scenes, the plot doesn't really progress beyond the first few pages. The majority of the book is stream of consciousness from the narrator, a 72 year-old widow with regrets, loneliness and a touch of incoherence. She creates a whole fantasy murder mystery around Magda. Also, anything with animal cruelty is an automatic "don't read" for me, so I wish I knew. I wish I could get my money back.

I didn't understand it. Purchased due to the reviews. Abstract piece of garbage with no point. Oh, and spoiler alert, she kills her dog for no reason. If there was any deep meaning, it was too deep for me.

I read this book in an entire day and was so disappointed at the end... the part about the dog was needlessly gruesome and half of the book felt like fillers in between conversation. I was really excited to read this but it's a solid 2/10. Don't recommend if you're looking for a mystery novel.

I enjoyed several of Moshfegh's previous books, and was enthused about reading this one. I was heartily disappointed..!! This book was disjointed, rambling, and actually made no sense.Vesta is an elderly widow who recently moved across the country. She purchased a former Girl Scout camp with lots of land. Charlie, a mutt she adopted is largely her only company.She stumbled across a note during her daily walk in the woods, and she her mind goes on a wild goose chase., creating scenarios that have no basis in reality.You get glimpses of Vesta's former life, her long and unhappy marriage to her deceased husband, Walter and so on.There were glimmers of goodness here and there, but largely, I had to struggle to finish this. Not Moshfegh's best work by a long shot.

Do not buy this book. Do not read this book unless you are a masochist. I have been reading books for 65 years, and this is the very worst book I have ever read. Run. Run as far away as you can.

This book is great! I think Magda is Vesta. Poor Vesta’s mind is unraveling at an accelerating pace. Magna is a beautiful woman who is as held an emotional captive by her controlling husband.I don’t even know if the note she found really exists because Vesta is a very unreliable narrator who is losing her mind probably from years of the horrible domestic abuse and loneliness and infidelity inflicted upon her by her stern German husband. Both she and Walter are immigrants albeit from different countries. She is passive aggressive and the cast of characters she concocts keep changing. Her deceased husband gaslighted her with his cruel mind games. He gave her sedatives to keep her docile. He was a Nazi sympathizer. Vesta speaks of abortions and she seems to have had at least one. Walter had his ways in dealing with her pregnancies. “It was messy but necessary”.She is a bitter and snobby elderly woman who fancies she is above other people and describes them with cynical bitterness. She is living practically off the grid with her dog and Pastor Jimmy’s pontifications on her old radio. Then one of the people in her psychotic world tells her Pastor Jimmy is dead and they are reruns? The time is sometime in the past since she does her library researches while trying to make sense of the note she claims to have found with Ask Jeeves which disappeared by 2005. Then there is the black catsuit she buys. I found that to be odd to say the least.Taken literally the book makes no sense but I see the similarity of Madgna herself and Vesta.Charlie’s death is horrendous but Vesta is not a sane person. The end brings the story to a horrible and sad end. But not all in life is pristine or perfect and the ending is as it should be.Did Vesta really have a dog? Is Vesta Magna? We are dealing with a deranged woman living in a dystopian bubble. Isolation and darkness are felt throughout this novel. Reality melts into sheer madness.This is not an easy or fun read but it is classic Ottessa Moshfegh who is one of my favorite contemporary fiction writers. Although I am close to Vesta’s age everything Moshfegh writes is so much more than Millennial drivel. I would love to see Moshfegh do a live reading of this book which was written before her last book and kept in a drawer. I am so happy she published it. I will read anything Moshfegh writes. She will go down as one of the greatest writers of the 21st century.

Normally like her style but this book is without interest at all. Rambles and drags on and now I hear there is animal cruelty. I’m halfway through and can’t see how it can possibly turn around. Time to call it a loss and move on. Wish I could get a refund!

Why, why didn't I read the reviews first? Clearly, I'm not the only one that found this book a waste. I kept trying to figure out what was happening, waiting for loose ends to be tied together, for some sort of 'ah-ha' moment. The pacing of the story made me think "something" would happen. Nothing. And the ending! What an incredibly awful ending. Plus--spoiler alert-- the ending has disturbing animal cruelty. Wish I could get my money back.

The unreliable narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh's third novel is seventy-two-year-old Vesta Gul, a widow who lives alone in the woods in a lakeside cabin. When walking her dog, Charlie, she finds a note on the ground which says: "Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body." However, there is no body to be found nor any evidence of violence in the nearby area, so Vesta decides that instead of contacting the local police she will keep the note and make her own investigations. And so begins a very strange and unsettling story where we see Vesta, a woman who was controlled and undermined by her late husband and suffering from past traumas of her own, set out on a journey to recreate in her mind what she thinks might have happened to Magda and how the young woman might have met her death. However, once Vesta has started on her journey and has conjured up a life and a whole personality for the dead woman, she (and the reader) begins to have trouble working out what is real and what is fabrication. And as the story unravels and we enter into the mind of a woman who has become disassociated from those around her, we become witness to her alienation, her paranoia and her mental disintegration.A clever and compelling story which captures the mind of a woman who has difficulty in differentiating fact from fiction and whose history is gradually revealed to the reader as she struggles to process what has happened to her - both in the present and in the past. Although I thought this was a compelling read and started and finished it in practically one sitting, I found it a rather troubling story and although darkly funny in places it was one that left me feeling rather unsettled - and the scene towards the end, involving an animal, was something I found very upsetting and although I can understand the author wanted something startling to demonstrate the unravelling of Vesta's mind, I feel sure she could have created something better - but obviously I can't discuss this further without revealing spoilers. So, in summary, a clever and thought-provoking story (and not a murder mystery as one might think by the blurb) but one that has left me feeling rather confused about how to rate it fairly by Amazon's star system - therefore I've given it three stars but I've changed my mind several times about the rating - whilst reading the book and even during the writing of this review - and may come back and change it once the story has had time to settle.3 Stars.

I've read everything Ottessa Moshfegh has written. I think her writing is original, closely observed and darkly humorous, and she can offer up some of the sharpest, most lucid and beautifully formed sentences I've recently read in American prose. But not so with this novel. It has the feel of something rushed, a moderately interesting idea pounded and squeezed for everything it has to offer until, in the end, it is bound to disappoint. It follows a similar narrative arc to 'Eileen', but doesn't have the same power of character and page-turning energy. The characters in this one have a stock feel to them, and although that might be part of the overall novel's design, I wanted them to be, and do ,more. Also, the writing has a flatness and unedited cloudiness about it that I was surprised to encounter in such an accomplished author. I persisted with this book only because I enjoyed her previous stuff, but if it was my first exposure to her work I may well have got bored and sacked it all off. For me the Moshfegh ranking would go like this: 'Homesick for Another World', 'Eileen', 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation', 'Death in Her Hands' (the novella 'McGlue' I'd put in a special category all by itself because I think Ottessa was possessed by some alien when that came out of her - mindboggling). So, bear the ranking in mind when you consider this purchase, but by no means overlook the benefits of reading at least some of what she's written. I'm definitely still a fan.

Where to start with Vesta, eh? She is a sort isn't she, I think she'd be described or even ascribe, as a wily old woman.She's sprightly for seventy odd, didn't like Walter too much. But wow, not sure how to describe this book but Vesta finds a note in the woods next to her secluded cabin in the woods, even though she has neighbours, but not neighbourly neighbours but the atmosphere was all engulfing. I raced through is in a day and a bit, after I'd started and finished The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven.If I could add infinity stars, I would. But it, borrow it but read it.

This book wasn’t what I was expecting - and not in a good way. It was the ramblings of a woman who was slowly losing her mind in the woods over a note she found on a dog walk that implied a girl named Magda had been murdered. That’s it, that’s all. If you’re looking for a thriller or expect her to be actually solving a realcrime, don’t pick up this book.This style of book was not for me. I was hoping for a thriller crime solving book, and instead, I got the ramblings of a bitter old woman (Vesta) reviewing her boring life and her unhappy marriage after the death of her husband. All the while, she is making up what may have happened to this girl and then losing her mind over it.The only thing I liked about this book was the characterisation of Vesta. The fact that she basically looks down her nose at most of the inhabitants of her small town, hates fat people, and does a rather horrible thing at the end of the novel, made her a wholly unlikeable character and unreliable narrator - and I actually enjoyed that. I liked that she wasn’t a nice old lady. I wasn’t rooting for her or feeling sorry for her. I detested her and I think that was the point. In spite of the great characterisation, I hated the long winded rambling where very little happens. I don’t mind forays into the mundane but this was just boring as hell at some points and the story didn’t really progress. There was nothing to solve. This wasn’t about a murder, it was about her descent into madness - but that isn’t what the book is sold as. It’s a rambling stream of consciousness and not my cup of tea.

I would have stopped reading halfway trough had this been my first book by Ottessa. But I kept at it and by the end I was totally captivated. It is a slow burner that ends with a silent explosion.