Eh. That about sums up my feelings regarding this book.

I attempted to read it when the Netflix movie came out because I’m a big believer in reading before watching, and the hype was big enough for me to bite. I made it roughly 100 pages but it never grabbed me. Reading it became a chore so I could watch the movie, but eventually even that couldn’t drive me to finish it.

I picked it back up the other day, wanting to give it another chance. I did start it over to give the book it’s fair chance, but it wasn’t until that last fourth of the book that it started to turn around - slightly - for me.

It’s a complete shame, because the premise is SO good. It had all the makings for a truly innovative horror novel, but everything fell flat. The characters were poorly fleshed out, the dialogue was awkward and unnatural, and even with the time jumps, the whole thing was in present tense. In my experience, prose in present tense is difficult to get right, and this didn’t hit the mark. The pacing is all over the place. Extremely slow build up, then a complete rush in the last fifty pages or so, as if the author was ready to be done with it. And everything was completely predictable. I was able to guess all of the major plot points long before they came to pass.

There was one part that got me so riled up that I had to put the book down and rant to my husband - the way the births in this book were described were very clearly written by a man and it was enough to completely remove me from the story.

The last fourth of the book was interesting enough for me to want to raise a 2 star rating up to a 3, but this book overall was a huge disappointment for me, especially after all of the hype of the movie. I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before, but here’s to hoping the movie is better!