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eggcatsreads 's review for:
What Mother Won't Tell Me
by Ivar Leon Menger
A huge thank you to the author, NetGalley, Poisoned Pen Press, and Dreamscape Media for providing this e-ARC/audiobook in exchange for an honest review.
A fairly slow-paced thriller that picks up by the end, and keeps you wondering if the siblings will survive to escape.
Unfortunately, I found this plot to be kind of slow and predictable, and the characters and plot weren’t enough to hook me to the end. I listened to this mainly through audiobook, and the narrator did a fantastic job voice-acting and keeping the emotions throughout the novel - and my being bored by the plot was not because of anything from the narrator. With this being a fairly quick audiobook, I found it interesting enough to continue until the ending - but to be completely honest, if I didn’t have the audiobook version to listen to while I was at work I probably would have DNF’d this book.
I kind of found the plot to be predictable, and didn’t like how weirdly attracted our main character was to the (spoiler) man she found to rescue her - considering she is 16 and he was most assuredly not. I get that she was sheltered, but it made me a bit uncomfortable to listen to, as an outside perspective. Even though there isn’t really any indecent behavior from this man and all the romance is entirely imagined by our main character, there was still something off about him and I could never fully be on his side. (Could be a translation issue, but I was always waiting for a heel-turn for him to betray them because something felt off the entire time.)
Speaking of, there was one specific spot that made me cringe so hard I seriously considered ending my entire read. I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but our main character decides to hide a book in her underwear and we spend ENTIRELY TOO LONG describing her sweaty body trying to “hold up her knickers.” I’m serious, that if I never read or hear the word knickers again it will be too soon. This could be an issue with the translation, but with the English version it felt like a WAY TOO intimate look at a child’s underwear and describing it falling down.
There were also a few spots that felt either too slow or too fast for what was going on. For instance, in the same “knickers” incident, our main character breaks into her father’s study and has her little brother keep watch. However, she spends entirely way too long in the study and causes herself to be trapped inside - even though her little brother gave her AMPLE warning when their mother stopped her shower. At other times, our main character did things horribly stupid for no reason other than to add tension to the novel - with one of them deciding to talk on the phone instead of text, even though her mother could come into the door at any second.
Once our main character learns the “truth” of her life, instead of amping up the tension it kind of fell flat, since I could tell how the rest of the book would end. However, I think if slower thrillers where the tension is more with HOW the characters escape, rather than shocking plot reveals or twists, this would work well for you. I kind of found the “twist” that the main character discovers to be anticlimactic, because the narrative is so obvious from the beginning what exactly is wrong.
A fairly slow-paced thriller that picks up by the end, and keeps you wondering if the siblings will survive to escape.
Unfortunately, I found this plot to be kind of slow and predictable, and the characters and plot weren’t enough to hook me to the end. I listened to this mainly through audiobook, and the narrator did a fantastic job voice-acting and keeping the emotions throughout the novel - and my being bored by the plot was not because of anything from the narrator. With this being a fairly quick audiobook, I found it interesting enough to continue until the ending - but to be completely honest, if I didn’t have the audiobook version to listen to while I was at work I probably would have DNF’d this book.
I kind of found the plot to be predictable, and didn’t like how weirdly attracted our main character was to the (spoiler) man she found to rescue her - considering she is 16 and he was most assuredly not. I get that she was sheltered, but it made me a bit uncomfortable to listen to, as an outside perspective. Even though there isn’t really any indecent behavior from this man and all the romance is entirely imagined by our main character, there was still something off about him and I could never fully be on his side. (Could be a translation issue, but I was always waiting for a heel-turn for him to betray them because something felt off the entire time.)
Speaking of, there was one specific spot that made me cringe so hard I seriously considered ending my entire read. I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but our main character decides to hide a book in her underwear and we spend ENTIRELY TOO LONG describing her sweaty body trying to “hold up her knickers.” I’m serious, that if I never read or hear the word knickers again it will be too soon. This could be an issue with the translation, but with the English version it felt like a WAY TOO intimate look at a child’s underwear and describing it falling down.
There were also a few spots that felt either too slow or too fast for what was going on. For instance, in the same “knickers” incident, our main character breaks into her father’s study and has her little brother keep watch. However, she spends entirely way too long in the study and causes herself to be trapped inside - even though her little brother gave her AMPLE warning when their mother stopped her shower. At other times, our main character did things horribly stupid for no reason other than to add tension to the novel - with one of them deciding to talk on the phone instead of text, even though her mother could come into the door at any second.
Once our main character learns the “truth” of her life, instead of amping up the tension it kind of fell flat, since I could tell how the rest of the book would end. However, I think if slower thrillers where the tension is more with HOW the characters escape, rather than shocking plot reveals or twists, this would work well for you. I kind of found the “twist” that the main character discovers to be anticlimactic, because the narrative is so obvious from the beginning what exactly is wrong.