I think Scorcher was so traumatized by his mentally I’ll mother and sister that he projected feelings of their helpfulness onto I don’t know if the author was sympathetic to Jenny but Scorcher as narrator certainly was. She clung to her perfect persona and was too brittle to handle the fact that her life was not going the way she expected. She could have talked to her doctor or a counselor or her family and friends. I understand the shame that she felt for their circumstances but an emotionally healthy person would have taken some action. When her perfect life cracked up so did she. Even her high school flirtatious behavior indicated that she was hungry for attention. She came across as narcissistic and cold. She was so used to being perfect Jenny that everyone loved. Separate question: Did anyone feel like Richie's betrayal was predictable? I got that 'things are too good' feeling early on, and all of Scorcher's doom-foreshadowing just solidified my hunch that his relationship with Richie was going to implode. if he didn't find them in the attic, what was really happening? Was he so far gone that he was gathering them elsewhere and then hallucinating a scenario where he discovered them in the attic? I wonder if his problems went deeper than paranoia, because Scorcher found the basket of things he was 'finding' in the attic. Since I really related to Pat, I think I wanted to believe that the animal was real, for his sake, even though things kept getting stranger and stranger and it was clearly all in his head. I couldn't put my finger on why they bothered me so much, until now. When I read Pat's posts about the animal, I just felt so deeply disturbed, and I got really jumpy. It is really easy to feel isolated in that situation, because there are only so many times you can admit to people that you're still out of work and your life really sucks.

This book really spoke to me (and disturbed me) because I'm unemployed right now, and I connected with Jenny's shame and Pat's need to feel productive and useful.

Broken harbor