Review: The Night Gwen Stacy Died

The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This is a confusing book.

It's not confusing because it's difficult to read or anything like that, but because the point is a little lost. Those looking for a comic book analogy of sorts will probably be disappointed, because, at its surface, the book is a story about a teenage girl who meets a man, and they run off together after staging a kidnapping. The man has taken the name of Peter Parker, Spider-man's real name, and he sees Sheila, the teenager, as Gwen Stacy, Spider-man's love interest early on before she dies. The story is a lot of dealing with our two protagonists, as Parker had a rough childhood and thus uses the Parker name to distance himself from it, and Sheila forces herself to play along with it a bit.

If that's it, it's a perfectly serviceable story. It moves along quickly, doesn't try to do too too much. This might also be a story about mental illness, or about mental detachment from the past, or about teen angst if you see Sheila as the chief point. There's a lot of weird stuff to go along with the story, and it never becomes fully clear where it's going. There are often pros and cons to that sort of thinking, but it didn't always work here and I can't tell if it's me thinking too much about the story or if the story itself didn't 100% succeed at what it was trying to do.

Overall, an okay read. Not sad I finished it, not sure I'd recommend it, either.



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