Rating: 3 stars
The main feeling I got while reading 98% of this book can only be described as icky. That is not necessarily the reason I didn't love it; I believe a book can be creepy, gross, out of line, etc. and still get five stars if the author plays it right. But this one just didn't make me super excited to keep reading.
I think the story was interesting, after you actually start finding things out. After you find out that certain characters are more dangerous than originally portrayed and Camille is really starting to figure out the mystery, it's a pretty riveting concept. BUT it takes a while to get there. Maybe this is just because I'm from Missouri, and while I'm from Kansas City I do still believe I'm fairly knowledgable of Missouri's small towns, but I was just bored reading about Windgap. All the parts where Camille is interviewing people just didn't keep my attention. Maybe it was the characters, which were cut and pasted from stereotypes of Midwestern small town women, or maybe it was the fact that I'm not huge into reporter-based approaches in murder mysteries anyway. Either way, the Windgap adventures didn't hold my interest.
Let's talk about Camille. On one hand, she's an interesting protagonist. She has a sordid and complicated past, some of which she doesn't even know about until the end of the novel, more than 30 years into her life. I liked the sharp objects theme and what that all had to do with her personally. It's one of those gruesome parts of the story that I actually found pretty captivating. Now, on the other hand, a lot of Camille's thoughts and actions were not plausible to me. Maybe she really is just that messed up, but I didn't see how she could do drugs with her 13-year-old sister, or sleep around with potential murder suspects without really confronting those issues. It would be fine if these events held some kind of significance, if they added depth to Camille's character or spurred on the plot, but they really didn't do either of those things. I just found the scene of Camille and Amma doing drugs completely ridiculous. Again, maybe I'm missing something there, but I just didn't like it. Again with the plausibility thing: I've been around Missouri small towns and it's not that easy for girls to be as completely outlandish as Amma and her friends were. Sure, kids smoke pot behind their parents backs and sneak alcohol into old barns and have underage relations. But at 13 years old, doing hard drugs and being so promiscuous? I didn't buy it.
About the twist. So, there are actually two twists, the fake one and then the real one. I think most people, myself included, saw the fake twist coming from a mile away. The real twist did surprise me, just because I didn't expect a second twist. I felt a little bit gypped. I spent the whole book assuming my knowledge of the killer was correct, and originally it was, but then they flipped it on us. I suppose that's what a good thriller is supposed to do. Ironically, we want to find out the twists before they happen but then we complain about the book's predictability when we do just that. But back to the point. I also found the second twist super rushed. I didn't catch everything about how the first twist played into the second one, and it just got a bit muddled for me.
Overall, I think the book is good, just not amazing or super intriguing and twisty. I would sooner recommend Dark Places by Gillian Flynn than this one, because the mystery aspect is more spread out throughout the book which makes the overall product more interesting, and the characters in that one agreed with me more.
No comments:
Post a Comment