So well written, you could feel everything Carly felt as a mom being faced with so many impossible situations and decisions again and again. Definitely and interesting twist with traveling thru time, probably something most people have wondered how it would change things. The book was hard to put down and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I always love reading about real women in history who defied everyone’s expectations. While this is was not one of my favorites, it did do that well, and I enjoyed learning about the landscape of the women fighting in such roles during WW2. However the book sort of dragged for me. I loved Kate Quinn’s other books that I’ve read but this just felt rather slow and wasn’t as engaging.

This was a DNF for me. The writing was so wordy and laborious and there was very little dialogue in the book, it was impossible for me to get into the story and relate to the characters. From the beginning it felt like a really hard start like you just got thrown into the story with no context. Even after a chapter or two I was trying to figure out what in the world was happening or why the characters where doing or thinking anything that was being described. So much especially went into the immediate feelings of Lilli but completely without a given reason. The characters were detached and seemed either immature, socially inept, and unlikeable in how they related to each other, or were just poorly created and unrealistic. I finally gave up.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I really did not see most of that coming. I caught tiny bits but then would second guess myself. There were so many twists and turns that I would think maybe I knew how it would go, then it would change tracts and throw a new wrench in there. Really good mystery/thriller.

The Collective was a mostly good read and not super predictable which I enjoyed. It centered around grief and bitterness that turns into revenge and vigilante justice, and how there is always a price to pay when that monster is fed.

Initially the first part of it felt a fairly uncomfortable for me - just kind of that feeling of looking at something ugly and hoping someone was going to name it for what it was but afraid they wouldn’t. It was throwing a fair amount of validity and justification on getting vengeance and feeding hate, as if it was going to fix everything when justice wasn’t served and grief felt helpless, taking it into your own hands.

But by the end the book, it started to shed light on the fact that there was sometimes more to a story than black and white, right and wrong. I don’t know that it did a ton of this to be honest but it at least touched on it, how life isn’t that simple and you can end up in this never ending black hole when one step leads to another you can’t get out of it. That you can always look at someone else as the offender without giving a second thought to how you cause an offense, and in condemning someone else this way, you condemn yourself. In the end it still felt a little skeevy to me in the vague ethics of it all though.

I can’t say it was favorite and still left a lot open to interpretation on the morality of vengeance, justice, bitterness, and hatred. But as a book and story in and of itself it was a pretty good story line.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.