normally i like books like this, but i hated the characters in this too much to actually enjoy it :/ i do appreciate what this book does, showing the way childhood abuse shapes who we are as we move into adulthood, the pitfalls women often fall into when they get married and become a wife, how mother/son relationships can sometimes blur the line between healthy and not healthy...truly, it does all those things well; that being said, every character is so painfully unlikeable this book almost felt like a chore.

abby's upbringing doesn't make up for the fact that she

literally murders someone, dismembers her body, and then feeds her to her unsuspecting husband.

like...im sorry??? she needs to be put UNDER the prison for that, good lord.

ralph is better than abby, but hes just not delved into enough to feel much more than bad for him. for the whole book hes just grieving a mother he had an unhealthy relationship with, and theres not much more to him.

the rest of the characters are bland and forgettable; even laura, ralph's mother, is nothing more than just there.

this book is also predictable, which i think takes the enjoyment out of it. abby's unhinged the entire time, obvious from the first chapter, so her 'decent' into the last part of the book is easy to see happening. overall, this book is just a weird, gross let down.

i liked this book at the start, but unfortunately in the end it WHOLLY missed the mark for me and feels more like it fell victim to the very system its trying to criticize. it tries so hard to be some sort sort of feminist empowering story trying to tell the story of female victims in a male-dominated world, but it just...doesnt? it barely scratches the surface of any real problems that women face, more so just laying flat the fact that men will often do bad things to women for the sole reason that they can and often will get away with it without trying to look into the characters beyond a surface level.

this story tried to be victim forward, but it simply could NEVER be that: the victims are a footnote to the man who murders them, two of which each only get a PARAGRAPH each in the last chapter of the book, whereas the story goes to lengths to describe the man who kills them, ansel, to us. we get his backstory, from his sad beginning to his end, which gives him absolution. like...what?

not only that, but the characters are so woefully flat. jenny and hazel are stereotypically written twins, two ofthe victims are hardly mentioned, lila is sparsely written about, lavender is a horrible mother, rachel is a character solely in name, and blue is just...there.

this book felt like it boiled down to 'all men are bad and all women are good' without trying to look into the reasons WHY ansel felt like he could do the things he did. im also sick and tired of stories like this having the main character be a psychopath. its such a horrible stereotype.

i did enjoy the authors writing style, but this story was simply horribly executed.

this book pissed me off more and more as i read it, which is a shame as i actually enjoyed the authors writing as a whole but the story was woefully surface level and the characters were one-dimensional and, quite frankly, annoying. carrie is horribly immature, cora is wicked (not in a good way), jess is manipulative, and matthieu and tom are just...there. the plot is sadly half-baked and not explored NEARLY as much as it could have been, and the relationships are shallow and none of the problems are ever really dealt with. cora, who should face consequences for her meddling, dies, and any other problems are just dealt with by virtue of what happened being a decade passed, so who cares anymore. like...what? very unsatisfying book altogether.

i’m not reading abt ayla getting raped, ending up pregnant, and then giving birth. what the fuck

this gets one star only because i suffered through finishing it.

this book is, to put it lightly, a horrific mess. the writing is choppy and disconnected while trying to be poetic (this pays off only sometimes, for the most part it comes off as pretentious and sloppy) which leads to a lot of it not making much sense at all. the characters are wholly (and i do mean wholly) unlikable because theyre so hard to understand; luke especially is an enigma, and NOT in a good way. the descriptions of the school (a massive part of the story) were so badly done that i couldnt make sense of how anything was laid out and it led to a lot of confusion throughout the latter part of the book. it also has seemingly not plot at all...? the entire book i was waiting to see what the endgame was, what the entire point of this book was, and im sorry but its simply nowhere to be found. forget stories that have lost the plot; this story didnt have a plot to begin with.

theres simply no substance to anything in this book. the characters suck, the writing isnt good, the relationship is horrible, and the overall experience was a bungled up mess.

there is a finite number of books we can read in our lifetime; dont waste one of those books on this one.

just couldn’t get into this one

i just hate the way this is written

the writing is EXTREMELY weak, the plot is boring and confusing, none of the characters are likeable, and the dialogue is horrendous.

my loan ran out and the library doesn’t have a copy of the ebook anymore :/