**spoiler alert** Okay, here's the Golden Rule of adapting And Then There Were None:
If anyone survives, the author has missed the point.
ATTWN, to me,**spoiler alert** Okay, here's the Golden Rule of adapting And Then There Were None:
If anyone survives, the author has missed the point.
ATTWN, to me, is a mystery thriller about people who abused their privilege to end an innocent life. The victims weren't entirely faultless, but there was an emphasis that these characters used their station and influence to play god. And that's the point of ATTWN; don't play god. It will catch up with you. It will end badly. You may even end up shooting Aidan Turner before you get to bang him again. You know. Bang Bang before Bang Bang.
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Filed Under: Things that had a profound effect on me this year.
I had a point to this. Oh, yes. A huge part of ATTWN is catharsis. Everyone is guilty. Comeuppance. Comeuppance!!
But not in this version. Not really. The villain is again a red herring that "dies" halfway through, but his motivations are so overblown and dramatic that he just seems like a psychopath and no one is enough of a convincing pawn to make him a puppetmaster. The Ten are apparently the cause of a suicide. Not in cahoots or anything, the most intimate of all relationships, but merely present for a stack of cards of events that toppled down on this girl's life. We get her diary entries instead of the taunting "Ten Little Soldier Boys" and the stretches that the author makes to make these clues are so thin and weak. The entries themselves are supposed to make us pity this poor dead girl, but...I couldn't. To be fair, no one in the book is likable. But the book doesn't have enough fun with making them unlikable, it tries to ride that line of relatable/despicable that never works unless you decide to make a few enemies with your audience, and it does not work here.
I was excited to see some diversity in the story, god knows Christie could use it, but when you introduce the only black guy for the soul purpose of him being to one to not die during a horror story, which is -yes really- explicitly stated by several characters, and joke about the size of his dick within ten pages of introducing him, nobody has exactly earned a tolerance medal.
The tone is also jarring. Every pivotal romantic scene occurs with a dead body in the room. And no one here deserves to die, that's the point of ATTWN, everyone there has taken a life through disgusting means. But here, one life takes ten (8) more. All because one girl was a bad lab partner, she dies? One girl micromanages and kicks a girl off debate team? Let's kill her. Honestly at certain points there's a dead body in the room and everyone seems kind of cheered up to see it, like, "Good, the bitch is dead," but it's the "likable" characters thinking it.
And the protagonist is such a useless character. She's supposed to be the acerbic, witty writer character and none of her jokes land, nor do her enabling choices make her relatable. She has no life out of her toxic BFF. Her BFF is bipolar. No one's allowed to call said BFF crazy. Until like, a page after Meg yells at someone for calling Minnie crazy, she calls Minnie crazy.
She has nothing going for her other than her innocence. And her crush on a boy. Other than, she's a pretty blank slate.
This book wasn't as scary or fun or sickening as it could have been. It went generic, and it hit the nail on the head. ...more
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