Do you ever sometimes feel you totally get an author’s thought process?
What if … schizophrenia were contagious! And what if … the only one who could stop the spread was someone who had schizophrenia before all this happened! Except … he’s spiraling off his meds and is unwilling to help!
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they aren’t after you (Joseph Heller — Catch-22).
A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac is a fairly typical thriller-zombie-pathogen type novel. All the standard plot points: strange disease starts to infect a small town, initial panic escalates to full blown pandemonium, military-enforced quarantine, protagonist chased.
Because I wrote pandemonium up there, I feel like thinking about pandas for a bit.
Okay. Done.
For a thriller, A Cure for Madness is well written. The characters aren’t flat puppets bouncing around on popsicle sticks and the pacing is well done; the amping up of the spread of the disease and the way the town starts to fall apart completely believable. The story takes place in a small college town in Maine, so I can imagine the whole story here, in my small university town in New Brunswick (province bordering Maine for the geographically-challenged), especially since McIsaac is also from New Brunswick. Granted, I don’t think we have a mental hospital. The last chapter is heartbreaking, when you realize what this has meant for Clare, our protagonist, who spends the later two-thirds of novel trying to protect her brother with his mental illness.
So it’s a good, solid, easy-to-read thriller novel that I have nothing to complain about, except for the fact that I generally prefer literary fiction to thrillers. But for those days when you just want to read something a little mindless and entertaining, A Cure for Madness works fine.
A Cure for Madness by Jodi McIsaac went on sale January 19, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.