reubenalbatross's Reviews (521)

I just couldn't be bothered to continue with this.

The story, while at first moderately interesting, just got dull and repetitive. 

I know the main character is young, but she just seemed really thick, and it was annoying me no end. 

The stakes were also so low, but being heighted unrealistically. 

The narration wasn't very good, and she kept drawing out words and the ends of sentences in exactly the same way, which just made the cadence feel very monotonous.

I didn't pick this up for the title, cover, or tag lines, but if I had I would have been disappointed. There is nothing thriller-esq or dark about this, and the title is misleading - its just a girl on holiday in Cornwall discovering adults lie and can be bad people. 

I would not have enjoyed another three hours of this. 

God...

This is the most compelling Stephen King I have read. Maybe the best horror.

I was so disturbed throughout, and the last third was truly terrifying. 

I thought some of the Africa stuff was a bit weird, and as per with King, some completely unnecessary  rape references. 

But... just... agh...

And a great ending! Never thought I would get that with a King novel.

I have now read this book, Hooked, and Twisted - this one is by far my favourite.
 
I really enjoyed the dynamic switch of the woman being the more assertive/dominant character, and the two of them being able to truly stand up to each other. 
 
Hooked and Twisted had a very similar plot beats and resolutions, which was getting a bit old, so I was pleasantly surprised by the plotlines within this book. I thought the characters and plotlines were much more developed and interestingly written than the other two books, and I would have happily read the book even if the romantic plotline was removed. 
 
On a pettier note, I was absolutely baffled by the description of 'bruschetta wrapped appetisers' and 'bruschetta wrapped bacon'??? That is not a thing?? Pretty sure she means prosciutto?? What a wild mistake - twice! How did somebody not spot that???  

I thought this had a moderately interesting story, but had such a singular narrative. I was hoping for more complexity and intrigue like in the original trilogy. Maybe this will build in later books, but I didn't see much evidence of that in this first instalment. 
 
I found that I didn't really care about or feel connected to any of the characters, which made the stakes feel pretty low. 
 
Some of the place names felt out of place and not cohesive, which at times brought me out of the story.
 
Maybe some of this disappointment is because I am comparing it so closely to the original trilogy, and if I viewed this as a separate entity, I would feel like it is a better book. However, I know I enjoyed The Final Empire way more than this one. 

There was also SO MUCH blatant and unincorporated info dumping throughout the book, and the epilogue just read like clunky exposition from the end of a generic mystery-thriller.
 
We also find out at the end that the majority of the novel only took place over one and a half days. There seemed a ludicrous amount of action to take place in this short timeframe, and it wasn’t made clear that the timeline was so short until the very end of the book, so this felt rather out of place. 
 

Also, Miles was trialled and executed in a week?? That seems like an oddly efficient process from a law system that has been berated for being pretty useless in the rest of the book.

 
In conclusion, I was pretty disappointed by this book. If this was the first book I'd read in this series, I very probably wouldn't have continued with it. However, because I enjoyed the original trilogy so much I am holding out hope for the rest of the series, so I will continue reading (especially as I have already bought the next 3 books). 

I wanted to try this as I've seen quite a lot of discourse about it.

Bearing in mind I didn't make it very far through the book, the opening just seemed so juvenile and derivative and the 'conflicts' so contrived and predictable. I can sometimes enjoy YA books with this sort of writing style IF there is a plot line or something interesting to hold my attention, but this one had neither.

I also really didn't enjoy the first POV's narrator. Her voice grated on me and sounded childish, which just compounded the issues I have with the writing style. 

Unfortunately, I just couldn't get behind the change of author between this book and the last. 

This book feels far more clunky and less intricate than Larsson's books, and somehow also seems less Swedish. 

Maybe I'll try it again in future, but at the moment I don't want to waste time on a book whose writing style I don't like. 

This was a very solid Nicci French. I was a little disappointed by the last one I read of theirs', but this has restored my faith.

I really liked the premise of hearing from all three women, and seeing the pieces coming together through them.

I had figured out the various reveals before they fully unfolded, but only at the pace of the narrator, so I felt like I was figuring everything out with her, rather than being bored by things I already knew. The ending was also suspenseful and interesting enough that knowing these didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book. 

In addition, the narration of the audio book was fantastic, and really added to the reading experience.

 I wish I had read this closer to the trilogy so I could remember all of the events it referred to, but I enjoyed the insights nevertheless.
 
Advice about spoilers - the entire story is essentially spoiler-free, and only really alludes to possibilities in future books. However, DO NOT read the postscript. It has such a huge spoiler in it that I wish I hadn't read. Don't make the same mistake as me! 

So good.

I can see how people can read this over and over again, and I certainly will be.

Also, before I even started reading my copy of this, it already had mysterious (maybe tea/hot chocolate) stains on it, so I felt in the club. 

I'm really torn over my rating for this. There were so many things I thought were really strong, yet some glaring things that ruined a full 5-star experience for me. 
 

My main issue is with the timeline at the beginning of the book. In May, the main character goes back to the hospital, and writes that it's 'been a year' and everything is 'crypt-like'. She only wrote about getting sick in Feb, how has it been a year?? If she meant 'it's been a year' in a saying way, like it's been a tough year, then why was the hospital crypt-like after only 2 months? There was also someone later in the book who in the first July had had one 7-month pregnancy and one undetermined length of pregnancy (both by captors, not in her ‘previous’ life). That means everything started happening waaay before Feb, at least in the November of the previous year, which I don’t believe fits with the mc’s storyline. Either this is a mistake, I've completely misunderstood something, or the timeline is just fucked. 
 
Also, I believe the surviving baby at the end of the book would have seemed much more powerful if we didn't already know that the human race was going to survive. I think it would have been better if the prologue with the scribes just didn't exist. It didn't add much to the book, and essentially ruined the ending for me, as the birth was the capitulation of everything, and we basically already knew the outcome. This also meant that the tension/suspense wasn't as high throughout the book, as we knew the human race was going to survive from the beginning, so it didn't feel as fatalistic as it could have done.

 

Also, the font chosen for the Kindle version was REALLY hard to read. I was having to expand the font size two or three points just to be able to barely read it, which I think stilted the reading experience.  
 
On the plus side, I really enjoyed the concept and how the book was written. I appreciated the nods to the LGBT community, especially to trans men, and it made me realise how often authors don't make reference to anything in the LGBT community, even in passing. (Though it was have been interesting to see the impact of the disease on trans people, I'm hoping to see this in the next book/s.) I liked how we were told the endings to side character's stories, it was a nice change from so many books where you never get answers. It was also scary (yet impressive) how many things the author got right about pandemics, and especially the modern reaction to them, all the way back in 2014.