Idol, Burning provides unrelenting insight into fandom culture—specifically the "J-Pop," or Japanese pop music fandom. Rin Usami captures the insulariIdol, Burning provides unrelenting insight into fandom culture—specifically the "J-Pop," or Japanese pop music fandom. Rin Usami captures the insularity and obsessive nature of "stan culture" with aplomb, and if you've spent time in any sort of online fandom over the years, there's a lot you'll recognize in here. (If you haven't... I think you might get a little lost reading this book, if I'm being honest—let the layman beware.)
But where it shines in its portrayal of the more toxic aspects of fandom culture, the narrative itself leaves something to be desired. The whole concept that this novella is supposedly predicated on—a girl coming to terms with her favorite pop idol maybe having assaulted a woman—isn't ever really the focus, and I understand why this detail is included in the book's summary, but the reality of the way this narrative transpires is much more mundane than fraught. This isn't a story about a girl being torn apart and forced to question everything she's believed in; it's more of a portrait of the insidious nature of obsession, and the ways in which it can lead you to become disconnected from reality. And of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all; I just think this could have been a more interesting project had there been a bit more tension and more of a shift within Akari's character throughout the story.
It's short and it's worth reading and Rin Usami is one to watch for sure, but I ultimately did want more from this.
Thank you to Netgalley and HarperVia for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I've been having a lackluster reading month and was craving something engrossing, and True Biz ended up fitting the bill perfectly. Set at the fictionI've been having a lackluster reading month and was craving something engrossing, and True Biz ended up fitting the bill perfectly. Set at the fictional River Valley School for the Deaf, True Biz is effectively a love letter to deaf culture, couched in a coming of age narrative mostly focusing on the budding relationship between two teenage students, Austin and Charlie. Austin comes from generations-old deaf family, whereas Charlie is the first deaf member of her own family; she was never taught sign language and was forced to grow up having very little communicative ability as her cochlear implant is barely functional. The novel also follows February, the school's headmistress, dealing with her failing relationship, her mom's poor health, and the potential imminent closure of the school. The novel's prologue also introduces the fact that three of the students at the school have just gone missing; we then go back in time six months to see the factors that led up to this event.
So, naturally, there's a lot going on in this book, and where it succeeds is in the thorough immersion it provides in deaf culture (Nović herself is a deaf author). This book informs and engages in equal measure; it's a crash course in deafness for those of us who are lacking in knowledge of deaf culture and history, but none of it feels rushed or underexamined or patronizing. (It's not for me to decide, but I can imagine that this book will be as much of a joy for deaf readers as it is for hearing readers.) That said, Nović's dedication to giving the reader the most thorough portrait of deaf culture possible was often to the novel's disadvantage; it resulted in a few unfortunate side effects, one of which was a Black character only receiving one single point of view chapter, which existed solely for the benefit of giving the reader a quick lesson on BASL (Black American Sign Language). The differences between ASL and BASL and the stigmas attached to the latter are fascinating, but it felt really shoehorned in, in an attempt to leave no stone unturned—I ultimately just wished that that character had more of a role in the narrative.
This novel isn't plot heavy, and for the most part, that works well. The quieter approach to depicting daily life at the school suits Nović's aims with this novel perfectly. That's why it's unfortunate that the decision was made to use the framing device which positions this book as some kind of mystery. I'll just say right now that the reality behind the disappearance of the three students is very anticlimactic, and I'm guessing the end of this book wouldn't have felt like such a whimper if we weren't told from the beginning that the whole novel was building to this event.
But critiques aside, I actually did really enjoy spending time with this book and I do think it's going to be a big hit when it publishes. Its characters are mostly complex, its style is compulsively readable, and its depiction of deaf culture is multifaceted and warm and unlike any other book I've read on the subject.
Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
The Burning Girls follows Jack, a vicar who relocates from Nottingham with her daughter Flo to a small town in Sussex, a town that has a rich and eeriThe Burning Girls follows Jack, a vicar who relocates from Nottingham with her daughter Flo to a small town in Sussex, a town that has a rich and eerie history involving Queen Mary’s purge of Protestants in the 1500s, and an unsolved mystery of two missing girls from the 1990s. Jack and Flo get drawn into the town’s mysteries almost immediately as a strange series of events begins to unfold, and Jack also has secrets of her own, because she’s a thriller protagonist so of course she does.
I mostly had a fun time reading The Burning Girls, but the whole thing fell apart for me at the end. This is a book that’s trying to do so many things and fully committing to none of them; I was rooting for it to all come together but it just didn’t. Threads are left open, subplots are left underdeveloped, the inclusion of certain details remains incomprehensible. I guessed the main twist out of left field very early on, so the whole time I had my eye on ‘evidence’ that would prove it, and I ultimately felt that it was so poorly executed it could hardly justify itself.
I also found the representation in this book incredibly concerning. The only Black characters are unhinged abusers committing welfare fraud, the only character with depression is a domestic abuser, the only gay character is closeted and self-loathing, and the less said about the character with dystonia, the better. None of these stereotypes are presented to be subverted or challenged or compensated with good representation elsewhere; it’s just a concerning blend of harmful tropes to absolutely no end.
Anyway, I’m not sure where to go from here with CJ Tudor -- this is my third book of hers, and I’ve yet to give any of them higher than a 3-star rating, but I guess there’s something that keeps drawing me back to her. I should probably just accept that I enjoy her settings and premises more than I enjoy her writing (which I found especially corny here)....more
Set in the liminal days following the Trojan War, The Women of Troy follows Briseis, who the reader may have met in this novel’s precursor, The SilencSet in the liminal days following the Trojan War, The Women of Troy follows Briseis, who the reader may have met in this novel’s precursor, The Silence of the Girls. Briseis begins that story as a free married woman in Troy and ends up a captive and slave of Achilles, the Greek fighter to whom she was given as a war prize when her city was sacked. Though Pat Barker begins The Women of Troy right where the last book left off, the sequel reads comfortably as a standalone. The two novels together, however, form a fuller picture of the life of Briseis.
You can read my full review HERE on BookBrowse and a piece I wrote about Cassandra of Troy HERE....more
Ghost Forest is a slim little tome and consequently doesn't leave the biggest impression on the reader, but I did find the time I spent with it to be Ghost Forest is a slim little tome and consequently doesn't leave the biggest impression on the reader, but I did find the time I spent with it to be worthwhile. In a style reminiscent of Kim Thúy, Pik-Shuen Fung writes lyrically about her experience as a Hong Kong immigrant growing up in Canada....more
About a month ago I read an interview with Cazzie David about her breakup with Pete Davidson. I could not for a million dollars tell you why I clickedAbout a month ago I read an interview with Cazzie David about her breakup with Pete Davidson. I could not for a million dollars tell you why I clicked on that article, having no emotional investment in either of these people, but here we are. I was struck by two things: how resonant I found the way Cazzie talks about anxiety, and the fact that she's open about having emetophobia, something I've struggled with since the age of eight. So that alone was enough to pique my curiosity about this essay collection.
The thing about this book is that you need to accept what it's trying to do and read it in good faith. Would this have been published if Cazzie weren't Larry David's daughter, of course not, but is she trying to join the ranks of great modern essayists like Jia Tolentino? Not in the slightest. These essays are self-indulgent, tone deaf, and solipsistic, but if you dwell on any of these things I promise you are taking this collection much more seriously than Cazzie is.
So let’s focus on the good, because I unabashedly loved this book. Cazzie’s writing won’t win any literary awards but she’s surprisingly incisive, especially when it comes to talking about anxiety and her fear of mortality. Another thing is, the more neurotypical you are, the less this book is going to resonate with you (not that you're necessarily neurotypical if you didn't like it). Cazzie makes absolutely no effort to be likable; she paints a portrait of what it's like to be fully in thrall of anxiety and the insidious ways it tears you apart from the inside out, affecting both your self-worth and your relationships. She makes comments like this, that are on one level dismissive and alienating (yes, some people simply "get really bad anxiety" and it's still a bitch for them to live with), and on another level were like looking into a mirror:
"I never understood social media posts advising people that "it's okay to not feel good all the time!" Who said that wasn't okay? Who is so okay to the point where they need to be reminded that it's okay when they don't feel okay?! When people "reveal" they "get really bad anxiety," I'm dumbfounded, because I've never not been anxious long enough to "get" anxiety. It doesn't leave. Not ever."
She’s also funny as hell. You’ll either get her humor or you won’t, and you’ll know by the end of the first essay which side you're on. But--surprisingly, for the fact that you're spending 300+ pages inside the head of an extremely unhappy person--this collection is fun. It's self-deprecating, it's clever, and above all else, it's an entertaining way to spend an afternoon.
This isn't for everyone (clearly), but I just really 'got' this book; I got what Cazzie was trying to do with it and I also got Cazzie as a person, and it made me feel slightly less alone in the world whenever I picked it up. At the end of the day, that's all you can ask from a book like this.
Thank you to Mariner Books and Netgalley for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
This should have been a short story. I can’t sit here and say that Nightbitch is an entirely unsuccessful project, because I think it does in fact accThis should have been a short story. I can’t sit here and say that Nightbitch is an entirely unsuccessful project, because I think it does in fact accomplish exactly what it sets out to do — I just found my patience for it wearing thin the longer I spent with it.
I’ve expressed my personal disinterest in books about motherhood before, so I always knew this book was going to be a bit of a gamble for me, but I had hopes that it would be a bit more “disaster woman who happens to be a mother,” rather than “mother who happens to be a disaster.” That wasn’t a problem, in and of itself — when it became clear to me how little my own vision for this novel overlapped with Rachel Yoder’s, I course-corrected my expectations as best I could. And I actually came to appreciate the relentless, brutally honest depiction of a young woman’s inability to cope with the demands of motherhood. This book is visceral and furious, and Yoder gets her claws into the reader.
But the longer it goes on, and the more the magical realism slant starts to take over, the more its impact starts to wane. For something so graphic and carnal, this book ironically has very little meat on its bones; it never justifies its length, its metaphors all wear themselves out — it says absolutely everything it has to say, and then it keeps going. And going. And going. It’s not even a very long book, only around 250 pages, but it isn’t able to sustain even that. Any appreciation I had for this book’s themes became eclipsed by my frustration at Yoder’s insistence at presenting this to the world as a novel, instead of what I think could have been a punchy and memorable piece of short fiction. Instead, I haven’t thought about this book once since I finished it.
Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I didn't hate this book at all but it was just so, so unremarkable. I loved the premise: Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins living with their motI didn't hate this book at all but it was just so, so unremarkable. I loved the premise: Jeanie and Julius are 51-year-old twins living with their mother in rural England who drops dead one day and suddenly Jeanie and Julius are forced to navigate a world they don't fully understand. It's different and interesting but it just really fell flat for me.
The problem with Unsettled Ground is that there's just no momentum. And I don't mean that in the sense that it would have worked better as a page-turner murder mystery or anything like that; I'm an advocate of the literary-thriller hybrid genre and I think Fuller nails that tone here--there is a bit of a central mystery but it's mostly a vehicle to explore the themes that she's interested in interrogating. That's all fine and well. But on a sentence-by-sentence level, this book dragged. There's no sense that it's moving forward toward anything, it just feels like it's spinning its wheels and I did not at any point find myself compelled to pick it up.
Like I said, I did enjoy some of the thematic threads that Fuller explored in this novel and I don't have an overwhelmingly negative feeling toward it; I just couldn't bring myself to get invested at any point and I think this would be an incredibly lackluster addition to the Women's Prize shortlist.
Thank you to Netgalley and Tin House for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I started out loving this but it did eventually start to fall in my estimation. I adored McLaughlin’s writing: it's clear-eyed and pacy and this is, oI started out loving this but it did eventually start to fall in my estimation. I adored McLaughlin’s writing: it's clear-eyed and pacy and this is, on the whole, a fairly enjoyable read. I'm also a sucker for anything having to do with art or art history or museums, so I loved the plot thread involving a woman turning up out of nowhere and claiming to have been responsible for a sculpture supposed to have been created by the late, famous artist Robert Locke.
Where I felt this novel fell short of its potential was in its domestic storyline: it follows art historian Nessa's failing marriage (her husband has recently cheated on her and they're trying to get past it for the sake of their teenage daughter), and it also introduces a figure from Nessa's past who holds a secret about her. For one thing, the two threads (Nessa's work at the museum and her home life) don't dovetail in a way that I find satisfying or realistic (Luke's hyperfixation on the statue was something I found almost absurd in how it was so transparently shoehorned in there). And for another thing, the secret about Nessa's past revealed something that shone rather a different light on her husband's cheating, which I felt could have added so much depth and complexity to that dynamic but which instead ended up feeling rather underexplored.
On the whole this wasn't bad but I also don't think it quite showcases what Danielle McLaughlin is capable of.
Thank you to Netgalley for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
"To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not
"To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not when it will spill. What you're trying to say is that it's easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than energy cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate. At some point, you must breathe."
Caleb Azumah Nelson's debut, a slim volume just under 150 pages, blew me away. I'm inherently skeptical of second-person narration; I find it particularly tricky to do effectively and with real purpose, so when I started reading it was with a slight apprehension, but Azumah Nelson won my trust effortlessly. His writing is absorbing and gorgeous, the bond between character and reader sealed by the author's choice to frame reader as protagonist, a choice that has the potential to fall flat but which instead is elevated by Azumah Nelson's sharp commentary on sight and observation.
This probably sounds like an off the wall comparison but Open Water is a bit like James Baldwin meets Sally Rooney. It has that tender, push-and-pull, will-they-won't-they quality of Normal People but it's also heavier; the stakes are higher; it's not a book generically about young love but instead specifically about young Black love, and the cost of systemic racism on Black love and Black bodies. It's a gentle, supple story, joyous and heart-rending and intimate.
26-year-old Caleb Azumah Nelson is an author to watch. Calling it now, whatever he writes next will be shortlisted for the Booker.
Thank you to Netgalley and to Viking for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
Despite having a deliciously enticing premise, Madam fails on just about every level. Set at the fictional Scottish all girMamma mia where do I begin.
Despite having a deliciously enticing premise, Madam fails on just about every level. Set at the fictional Scottish all girls’ boarding school Caldonbrae Hall, Madam introduces Rose, a bright young ingenue of a teacher who gets a job as the head of Caldonbrae’s Classics department — notably and oddly, she’s the school’s first outside hire in over a decade. She arrives at Caldonbrae and quickly discerns that there is fuckery afoot.
The entire function of Rose’s character is to unearth the fuckery. There is so little interiority to her character that there is never a sense that she is a real person living this experience; she is transparently a thriller protagonist bumbling around chasing clues, and she does an agonizingly terrible job at it. Every time a character starts to reveal something and then realizes they’ve said too much, Rose lets it go — quite the impressive regard for boundaries, given the fact that when she isn’t walking away from people mid-conversation, she’s asking everyone and their mother impertinent questions that go nowhere. This is, quite literally, the entire book. The fuckery is, of course, eventually unearthed, and yes, it was indeed the most obvious explanation that you guessed by page 50, but anyway, what happens at this point in the book? Rose actually takes the fate of her students into her own hands? She allies with someone to bring about systemic change? She realizes resistance is futile and makes a plan to get the hell out of Dodge? No, she basically just… asks more questions. More specific questions, this time around, to be fair to her.
Anyway, I mentioned briefly that Rose is a Classics teacher, so let’s go back to that. Having been raised by a second-wave feminist, Rose has internalized a lot of her mother’s values (she wouldn’t go as far as to call herself a feminist though, heaven forfend! Sidebar: I’m not sure that in 2021 we still need novels that spoon-feed feminist ideology to the reader by adding a spoonful of sugar to the medicine, holding our hand and reassuring us that “women are people too” isn’t a radical, scary notion, but… Phoebe Wynne disagrees, I guess). Anyway, Rose is drawn to female characters and historical figures from Greek and Roman mythology and history, and spotlights a handful of them — Antigone, Dido, Medea, Lucretia, et al. — in her classes. The integration of classics into this novel is so ham-fisted, so unsubtle, so unnecessary, it bears asking why it had to be the classics at all. The Secret History (a very different project with very different aims that I am not attempting to compare to Madam on a deeper level, to be clear) would not be The Secret History if it were about a group of chemical engineering students — the classics are so integral to that novel’s themes and framework that it would crumble without that element. If We Were Villains would not be If We Were Villains if the students were studying Jane Austen instead of Shakespeare. This isn’t a criticism; it shows how deliberately constructed those novels are. In Madam, the classics are merely an arbitrary addition that could have been substituted with impactful women from any period of literature or history and netted the exact same result: a half-baked commentary on how History Has Not Been Kind To Women.
Aside from being thematically careless, this book was just poorly written on a sentence-by-sentence level. Inexplicably, most scenes are recounted in the pluperfect tense:
“Earlier that morning she’d knotted her unruly hair into a thick plait[…]”
“Rose had gazed at the delightful picture they all made, touching her own blazer with a tinge of shame.”
“She’d stopped by Anthony’s office on Friday to see if he wanted to go for a walk together over the weekend.”
Why? Why are we being narrated scenes that already happened rather than just… being shown those scenes? The whole thing takes on a very tell-don’t-show style, which I believe can work in certain circumstances, but this ain’t it. Also, the details in this book are all in the wrong places. It’s set at a boarding school, and the school itself is barely described — we are usually up to date on the state of Rose’s hair, though. I also think it should be a cardinal sin for a book to start with a journey (in this case: Rose on the train to Caldonbrae), end the chapter when they arrive, and start the following chapter the next morning. We don’t see Rose settling into her flat, we don’t see her walking around the school, we don’t see any of it. The exposition is just terrible. Characters are also introduced at such a lightning speed that I couldn’t keep track of who anyone was and I had no sense of how many students or teachers were at this school.
Changing gears now: as other reviewers have noted, the white saviorism and the tokenistic portrayal of a group of Japanese students is downright shameful. Diversity does not need to serve a narrative function, and indeed, it’s often better when it does not, especially in the hands of a white author writing about non-white characters. Here, the function is both extant and obvious: it’s to illustrate by comparison how progressive Rose is. And I quote:
“The general spread of white faces made Rose uncomfortable despite the small handful of Asian girls, who seemed to group together. This lack of diversity leaked across the staff, too — not at all appropriate or modern for the nineties, she thought.”
Speaking of diversity and representation, I’m not sure why some people are calling this book queer? It’s not. There is one (1) lesbian character, not the protagonist, and she’s a self-loathing alcoholic, so… not sure why that’s something to celebrate, but whatever.
Anyway, back to the above quote, gross depiction of Japanese students aside — this book is set in the 1990s. That sweet spot for dark academia novels, where authors have the convenience of writing virtually about the present-day, but where the characters don’t have cell phones and laptops which would destroy both the atmosphere and undermine the characters’ work at solving the mystery. That’s all fine and well, but if you take out all the references to Queen and Batman Begins, this book feels like something out of the 1800s. You will hear no disputes from me about the fact that misogyny is alive and well and that certain individuals and institutions hold antiquated values, but those conservative values are satirized to such an extreme here that they start to feel utterly absurd. And the problem is that this book is not trying to be satire. I’m supposed to take it at face value, even when it’s pushing my suspension of disbelief further and further past its breaking point.
Which brings us to The Fuckery. As discussed, I found it very obvious, but that is honestly the least of my damn concerns. The details here were just… so, so ridiculous, trying so hard to be provocative. The “Worship” scene (if you know you know) is the most unintentionally funny thing I have read in my entire life. This was supposed to be a horrifying scene and I just couldn’t stop laughing at the fact that someone actually greenlit this garbage. I could practically see Phoebe Wynne rubbing her hands together in glee for having shocked the reader with something so DARING and TABOO when it actually just served to undermine the impact of whatever psychological abuse was going on here by turning the whole thing into a dark, fucked up cartoonish pantomime.
This was just an incoherent, poorly-constructed project that had no ardor, no artistic integrity, and no intrigue. It was bizarrely terrible and did not have a single redeeming quality and it made me feel cynical about my profession (I’m an editor) and if you take anything from this review let it be this: read literally any other book! Please! I don’t care how good the summary is! I suffered so you don’t have to!!!
Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
I guess it's natural to be slightly underwhelmed by a book that's gotten as much hype as Luster has. And it absolutely does deserve the hype, in a loI guess it's natural to be slightly underwhelmed by a book that's gotten as much hype as Luster has. And it absolutely does deserve the hype, in a lot of ways. Raven Leilani's voice and writing style are spectacular, and so is her characterization of protagonist Edie. This is very much a "disaster women" book (i.e., a subgenre of literary fiction about 20-something year-old women having a lot of casual sex and making terrible life decisions) but it's also its own thing, refreshing both in voice and structure.
My main issue with this book isn't even something it did wrong, per se - but about 40% through the book it took a turn that I didn't want it to take, and we ended up spending the rest of the book in a situation that I found much less interesting than the one that had been presented to us at the beginning. I didn't find Rebecca to be a particularly convincing figure and her dynamic with Edie really failed to engage or move me. Even less interesting to me was Eric, Edie's love interest, an older, married, white man (Edie is a Black woman, and much younger than Eric - it's a dynamic that facilitates moments of sharp insight on Leilani's part but Eric himself is something of a wet blanket). It's Edie herself that holds this novel together (she's a realistic, sympathetic, compelling figure); it's the circumstances she finds herself in that I felt didn't ultimately live up to their narrative potential.
I initially gave this 4 stars but I waited a few weeks to write this review and in that time this book has sort of faded in my estimation and I haven't really thought about it since putting it down, so that's never an amazing sign. I think this is a promising debut in a lot of ways and Raven Leilani is absolutely an author I'll be keeping an eye on, but this didn't quite do what I wanted it to do for me.
Thank you to Netgalley and FSG for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
Like most anthologies, Kink: Stories was a mixed bag, though it's certainly enjoyable for its novelty alone (its thesis being that erotica has a placeLike most anthologies, Kink: Stories was a mixed bag, though it's certainly enjoyable for its novelty alone (its thesis being that erotica has a place in literary fiction). I found the preponderance of stories about BDSM started to get a little boring after a while, but this was otherwise a refreshing collection that I enjoyed spending time with.
I felt the stories that were the most successful were the ones that contextualized the characters’ kinks—I don’t mean that in a ‘every kink comes from a fucked up childhood’ kind of way; I mean that your life and your sex life are part of the same whole and some of these stories were more interested in interrogating that intersection than others.
The two absolute stand-outs were Brandon Taylor's Oh, Youth (tender, devastating) and Carmen Maria Machado's The Lost Performance of the High Priestess of the Temple of Horror (weird, sensual)--incidentally the two longest stories in the collection. The other surprising highlight for me was Trust by Larissa Pham, an author I'd never heard of, whose Vermont-set story I found evocative and effectively moving.
The less said about Roxane Gay's Reach the better, and a handful of other stories fell flat too, mostly the ones that lacked interiority of any kind. You could tell that a lot of these authors wanted to forgo character and dive straight into Commentary About Desire, and I always found that much less effective.
(Also, anyone looking forward to new Garth Greenwell should know that his story, Gospodar, is a chapter taken straight from Cleanness--I ended up skipping it when I realized I recognized what I was reading as I hadn't particularly enjoyed that chapter the first time.)
Bottom line is that it's honestly worth the price of admission for Taylor and Machado, but otherwise it didn't totally reach its promising potential.
Thank you to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
The Lost Village, originally published in Swedish as Staden in 2019, has a rather striking premise: in the 1950s, all 900 inhabitants of a remote SwedThe Lost Village, originally published in Swedish as Staden in 2019, has a rather striking premise: in the 1950s, all 900 inhabitants of a remote Swedish town vanished without a trace. There were only two people left behind - a newborn baby and a woman stoned to death in the town square. In the present-day, documentary filmmaker Alice has been obsessed with this town since she was a child, as her grandmother's entire family disappeared in the incident (her grandmother had moved away and was living in Stockholm at the time), and Alice decides to make an excursion to the town with a small filmmaking crew to uncover the truth about what happened.
And the premise is indeed the strongest thing about it - it kept me turning pages simply because the central mystery was so bizarre and fascinating. There are dual timelines, past and present, with the present-day getting more of a focus, and I thought this balance was done well. The tone was also fantastic - I wouldn't necessarily describe this book as creepy or gothic in atmosphere, but there was this sort of gently thrumming sense of terror throughout the whole thing (not dissimilar from Midsommar which this is probably going to be compared to quite a bit).
That said, my first issue with this book cropped up within the first few pages, which is simply that the writing is quite amateurish. I'm not sure whether the clunkiness can be ascribed to the original prose or to the translation (I'm inclined to think the former - my issues weren't typically with word choice as much as poorly written exposition), but either way, it took some getting used to.
I also found the treatment of mental health to be rather cringe-inducing. Mild spoilers: It's pretty obvious one character's possible 'psychosis' is set up to be a red herring in a rather half-baked attempt to provide a meta commentary about the stigmatization of mental illness, which... isn't half as progressive as thriller writers seem to think it is. For one thing, try to read this exchange without rolling your eyes into the back of your head:
"I saw them in your tent," he goes on. "In the toiletry bag, when I was borrowing your toothpaste. Abilify." He pauses. When he goes on, his voice is heavy.
"Abilify is an antipsychotic. Right? That's what it said on the packaging."
And for another thing... why? We know mental illness is stigmatized. We know. This is not a particularly clever or incisive or subversive commentary on that fact. Maybe as a writer you could try to come up with a more creative way to sow seeds of doubt into a group of friends than the dramatic reveal of - gasp - Abilify...
Anyway, it's hard to comment on the resolution without giving anything away, so I'll stay vague. I found some parts satisfying, some annoyingly convenient, and some just raised the question how did the initial investigation overlook this?
So on the whole, I just found this frustratingly uneven in execution. I certainly did enjoy reading this more often than not, I'd just encourage you to lower your standards if it piques your interest.
Thank you to Netgalley and Minotaur Books for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
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