Let me just say right off the bat that my opinion of this
book is clearly the minority view, so if you were strongly considering reading
this book, I would suggest also checking out the higher-rated reviews as well
for a more well-rounded assessment.
This is actually the second book that I’ve read by
Michele Campbell (the first one being her sophomore novel She Was
the Quiet One) and seeing that I had enjoyed her previous work, I had
high hopes going into this one. Unfortunately, this book turned out to be
very different from what I expected, and not in a good way either. The
biggest problem I had was with the structure of the narrative, especially the
first two-thirds of the story, which switched back and forth between the point
of view of Caroline Stark (a 43-year-old rich woman with a mansion on the
beach) and Aidan Callahan (a 27-year-old bartender with a questionable past) –
normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but with this story, it was particularly
confusing because the exact same events / situations would be told in
completely opposite ways, so as I’m reading, I have no clue who is telling the
truth and how things really happened. Though I get what Campbell was
trying to do by structuring the first two-thirds of the book this way with the
whole unreliable narrator thing, I think the reason why it didn’t work for me
was because it was overdone and dragged out for way too long (basically there
would be one chapter from Caroline’s perspective and then the next chapter
would be from Aidan’s perspective, but describing essentially the same event –
this went on for at least 40+ chapters, though to the author’s credit, the
chapters were relatively short) – this made the story too tedious and a chore
to read.
Structure of the narrative aside, the other major problem
I had was the characters, all of whom were written in a way that they came
across as clichéd and unrealistic – most important of all though, none of the
characters were likable and not only was I not able to connect with any of
them, I also couldn’t bring myself to feel an ounce of sympathy for them either.
Actually, come to think of it, “unlikeable” is too nice a word --
“loathsome” is a better fit for how I felt about most of the characters, though
in the case of Caroline, I would probably go even harsher. Caroline
actually got progressively more loathsome and annoying as the story went on, to
the point that near the halfway mark, I finally got fed up and decided to skim
through the rest of the book so I could still get a general idea of the plot
without having to endure any more of Caroline’s stupidities (sorry, don’t know
how else to say it). I’ve said before how much I can’t stand characters
that are written in a stereotypical way – well, in this book, every single
character is portrayed in this manner, but not only that, their actions
actually get more and more ridiculous and outrageous with each chapter
(Caroline especially here, as she not only kept making poor choices over and
over again, she also kept whining about those choices, made no attempts
whatsoever to fix the messes she caused, then tried to blame others attempting
to help her for petty things like “stressing” her out or calling her at the
wrong time...and that’s just scratching the surface of her “antics”). The
characters as well as the direction in which the story seemed to be headed
(which was essentially nowhere at that point) became such a huge source of
frustration for me that I was actually tempted to DNF the book in order
to preserve my sanity -- the only reason I didn’t go that route was because I
was past the halfway mark already and I figured, given all the time I wasted
reading the book up to this point, I was at least owed the “satisfaction” of
seeing how it ends (more specifically, I wanted to see what type of
comeuppance, if any, the characters would get).
I don’t want to say too much more, as I’m afraid I might
end up giving the story away through all the complaints I have about the
characters and their actions (with Caroline, I had actually written down 2 full
pages of things that annoyed me about her – and that was only from the first
half of the story before I started skimming!). Again though, I’m the
outlier here, as everyone else seemed to like this more than I did, so perhaps
this book just didn’t jive with me. As for this author’s other works, I’m
actually on the fence as to whether I will continue to pick up another of her
books – on the one hand, this is a repeat author for me and I truly did like her
previous work, but on the other hand, this book left such a bad taste in my
mouth that I don’t know if it will tarnish my expectations of her next book.
I guess we will have to see what happens….
Received ARC from St. Martin’s Press via NetGalley
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