Liked this book a lot. Discovered it via NYT book review. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/books/review/jade-sharma-problems.html

I think it's her first book, hope she keeps writing. Sad but hopeful story, told with tons of biting humor. ( )

I have to admit that when I started reading Problems by Jade Sharma, I almost immediately put it down. My sister a few months ago died of a heroine overdose and my mother has MS. Within the opening pages, Maya describes her heroine addiction and how her mother has MS. It was a difficult opening for me. I kept going though and was glad.

Within the book, we are introduced to Maya who had a heroine and pill addiction. She is married to Peter, but cheating on him with her college professor. Maya's life is unraveling.

After a trip to Peter's home during the holiday season, Maya recognizes how much her life is a mess, how much the rest of the world doesn't seem to care about her, and how she must now face the world alone. Peter leaves her, the professor dumps her, and she is laid off. Maya now must make some choices in her life about where to go.

It is almost too easy to write- this is not a book for everybody. I even wondered, while reading it, if it was a book for me. Maya is funny and sarcastic, but isn't very likable and is barely redeemable. She is a junkie, a cheater, and pretty much only thinks about herself, but also recognizes she has flaws and is at times unlikable. She recognizes this within herself, so it is difficult to put her down further.

Maya won me with her inner monolog and her outlook on life. As stated earlier, she is funny and I was roaring internally throughout the whole scene where she visits Peter's parents. She is trapped in her own personal hell as she is with people she doesn't like and who don't like her, she can't smoke, and she is trying to detox (unsuccessfully). She hates Peter's sisters, except she realizes there is a dark edge to some of them. Maya's monolog throughout this time was pretty funny.

Sharma's writing was a back and forth for me. She wrote well, but there are just passages that are really too crude, even for Maya. Maya is a cheeky and horny minx and really likes sex, but sometimes the way Sharma writes about it, it seemed about the level of a 5th grader writing about sex. She does this a few times, where Maya will have a witty outlook or a really deep one, but then revert back to this 5th grader. It was a difficult read for that reason, at least for me.

So should you read it? Tough one. If sex (and there is a LOT of it), drugs (lots of drugs, but not as descriptive as the sex scenes), and a messed up life is your cup of tea- absolutely. If not, you probably want to avoid this one.

I gave this one 3.5 stars. I just wish the language didn't slip here and there. ( )

My reading experience was jarring and I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. Sharma's style of writing is a bit disconnected and felt, at times, totally random. While I was interested in Maya, it was hard to keep up with what exactly was going on. ( )

I'm going to be honest: I decided to sit down and read this one after I heard that the author had passed away. There's something about hearing that an author you haven't yet read has passed that makes you want to figure out what's been lost. "Problems" isn't a perfect novel -- it's obviously a first effort, and it sometimes seems that the author was honing her craft as she was writing it -- but it's got its strong points and suggests that we lost a valuable voice when Jade Sharma died.

As a prose stylist, Sharma has her moments, but the writing here varies widely in quality. The novel describes the disintegration of the main character's marriage and an uncomfortable Thanksgiving she spends with her husband's family, but this material feels a bit out of place, and is it's a lot less interesting to read about than her tales of desperation, squalor, and scam artistry, which are the bread and butter of junkie lit. Even so, "Problems" is if nothing else, an astonishingly candid and thrillingly intense piece of writing. We get it all: the narrator's urges, compulsions, anger, sexual fantasies, self-doubt, vanity, aggression, you name it. "Problems" sometimes reads like a Portnoy-level act of psychological striptease. Of course, it's hard not to read "Problems" as a lightly fictionalized autobiography: the author's voice is too raw, and the details she includes too specific, to come from "Intervention" reruns. In a way, this makes "Problems" seem especially daring. The author doesn't just discuss drug use, she also includes the sort of thing that might make her seem less than likable: she's not afraid to write a main character who can occasionally be petty, judgmental, self-indulgent and self-pitying. But this level of psychological honesty also has the effect of laying bare what turn out to be some pretty heavy psychological contradictions. Maya, our main character, constantly craves both power and abasement. She experiences moments of thrilling self-confidence and utter emotional helplessness. We see her criticize others for settling into comfortable careers while she makes a royal mess of her own life. Reading "Problems" feels a lot like watching the author battle her demons right before your eyes. The book's ending is uplifting, which, in a sense, makes the author's early passing even sadder. Somewhere along the line, it seems that she was overcome by the issues she wrote about. But she left a novel that -- who knows? -- might someday be seen as a valuable account of the opioid crisis that swept through the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. And that's more than enough reason to read this brief, affecting novel. Rest easy, Ms. Sharma. ( )