Looker by Laura Sims

Looker by Laura Sims

The Professor lives in Brooklyn; her partner Nathan left her when she couldn't have a baby. All she has now is her dead-end teaching job, her ramshackle apartment, and Nathan's old moggy, Cat. Who she doesn't even like.

The Actress lives a few doors down. She's famous and beautiful, with auburn hair, perfect skin, a lovely smile. She's got children - a baby, even. And a husband who seems to adore her. She leaves her windows open, even at night.

There's no harm, the Professor thinks, in looking in through the illuminated glass at that shiny, happy family, fantasizing about them, drawing ever closer to the actress herself. Or is there?

Quite an unusual book for me, a short, read in one day, profiling a psychological study of a disturbed complex character. Written in the first person, this novel follows the life of the unnamed main character who is trying to deal with an impending divorce and a life that appears to be unravelling. As her life disintegrates so does her sanity as she becomes fixated on a glamorous actress who, with her perfect husband, children, house and life seems to highlight this woman's' failings.

Our main character is a professor who teaches night classes in poetry to a class of 7 students. She has pretty much all day to observe the actress who lives opposite and she starts to fantasise about the actresses' life and her own involvement in it. She becomes so obsessed that she can hardly tell fantasy from reality, all the while she mourns her dead marriage and her inability to be able to have children, the main reason she believes her marriage failed.

When Nathan, her husband leaves her she is all alone, no one else in the building after a couple move out. All she has is Cat, Nathans cat, for company. She didn't really even like cats but once she knows he wants it back she resolutely hangs on to Cat.

A moment of madness leaves her with her job at risk as well as her personal life out of control as she falls ever deeper into loneliness, depression and low self-esteem, a woman loosing her sanity through jealousy and hatred.

An insightful look into this woman's mind takes the reader on a first person journey with the character through a mental breakdown showing how easy it is to become fixated on someone else's life that you deem to be more successful and happy than your own.

At only 200 pages long, Looker is a quick read and doesn't have many 'twists' or 'surprises' for the reader as it comes to its sad conclusion. I am sure I can't be the only one who felt that the ending could really have been more of a beginning, that there was so much more to tell. However it was sympathetically written, a bit unsettling with stalker like tendencies but nevertheless worth 3 stars,

I would like to thank the publisher for sending this in exchange for an honest review.