An Unlikely Proposition by Rosalyn Eves

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Macmillan Children's Books in exchange for an honest review.

An Unlikely Proposition is the second book in the Unexpected Seasons series, although you can read it without having read the first one and pick up on most of the story beats. This book focuses on Thalia (from the first book) and Eleanor (new) as they navigate romance and their livelihoods on the London marriage scene.

I'm going to be honest, Thalia was not the character I particularly wanted to read more about. She was my least favourite from the first book and I wasn't really looking forward to spending more time around her. Having said that, she is much less infuriating this time around. She still makes some bad decisions and I still found her poetry stuff a little annoying. 

Unfortunately though, the main takeaway was this book didn't really make me feel anything. I only read it about a month ago and already I can remember so little about it. Eleanor is fine as a protagonist but she is quite flat. She is prim, to the point where I found it really hard to buy that she is only 17. I had to keep reminding myself that she was a young woman because it was almost jarring when she started doing what Thalia was. I kept mixing up the two love interests and now I couldn't tell you a single thing about them. I don't want to be mean, I just generally can't recall even their names.

Overall, I unfortunately can't recommend this book. The first one is still a good time for most of it so I'd give that a read, but this didn't really offer me anything new

Overall Rating:

.5

Twelve Dates of Christmas by Jenny Bayliss

 

I received an ARC of this book thanks to NetGalley and publisher Pan Macmillan in exchange for an honest review.

It is no secret by this point that I like my romance setups as ridiculous and as needlessly convoluted as possible. I adored the idea of someone going on 12 dates over the festive period having been matched up with people on an app, and on that front this book didn't really disappoint. I also quite liked the protagonist and thought she was both relatable and likeable. It was refreshing to see her having quite open and relaxed romantic attitudes towards dating several people (well, for a romance book anyway) and I like that she didn't get punished by the narrative for these views.

Sadly, that's most of the praise I can give this book. From the start, it is painfully obvious what direction this book is going to go. Even with the attempts at misdirection, I knew almost instantly who the protagonist would end up with and I was right. This takes away a lot of the fun and potential suspense from the dates and the story as a result. There is a lot of good Christmas imagery and events which happen here, but the dates themselves take a backseat to the other things going on in the main character's life and that was a shame.

My other main criticism was the writing. It did settle down but initially every character is described in semi-flowery detail and it really bothered me. Love interests should absolutely be described in an attractive or interesting way, but it was extended to every person she met pretty much, at least in the initial quarter or so. It did decrease which helped but it almost made me put the book down which is not a good sign.

Overall, there isn't anything major wrong with this book but I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as I'd hoped to. The predictable plot and subsequent lack of tension just made me switch off whilst reading it. Romance books don't need suspense to keep me interested but then I want time devoted to the actual romance, rather than a last-minute obvious hookup. If you want a light Christmas read then this won't do any harm but there are also better ones out there.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Birds, The Bees, and You and Me by Olivia Hinebaugh

This book. This book makes me feel conflicted in a way I haven't for a while. The Birds, The Bees, and You and Me is the story of Lacey, a teenage girl who has been raised to be very informed about sexual health. When her school starts running terrible sex ed lessons, she takes matters into her own hands and begins teaching her classmates about sexual matters. However, this is only a small part of the book. Lacey is best friends with Theo and Evita, who used to date but broke up due to Evita's asexuality. Theo has a new girlfriend who neither Lacey nor Evita really like. Lacey has started to develop feelings for Theo, and she is also conflicted about whether to spend her future studying to be a nurse (like her mum) or following her music passion (like her friends want her to).

I'm gonna start with the positives of this book because there are a few. Firstly, the sexual health stuff is all great. It's handled a little obviously but that doesn't bother me in a book like this and there are a few self-aware moments of characters being preachy. I really liked the pregnant teen plotline and all of the nurse stuff, while possibly unrealistic, was very unique and enjoyable to read about. Evita is asexual and honestly such a fantastic character. Aside from being a little mean to Theo, she is a great friend to Lacey throughout and is unrealistically understanding about absolutely everything. At the beginning, I also really liked Lacey and Theo. My fondness for Lacey mostly remained throughout but Theo...

Oh Theo.

This romance was BAD. There was nothing inherently wrong with it on the surface but there were a lot of unfortunate choices made. Firstly, Theo and Lacey had such a good friendship at the start. The second romance came into it, I stopped being interesting in their relationship. Theo set off all kinds of warning bells I don't think he was meant to. He was secretive, he put a wedge between Lacey and her friends, he was instantly controlling and negative about her potentially not going to the same college as him. I kept waiting for the narrative to reveal their relationship was a bad idea and for Lacey to dump him but that never happened. The only part I liked were their sex scenes and that's only because they were written so well. They demonstrated how to have discussions about consent and boundaries without it ruining the mood, and how good sexual communication should work.

I really really wish this hadn't been a romance. It could have worked so much better without that plot and I hated seeing Lacey and Evita's friendship being disturbed by some guy. Even with Evita magically being the most understanding person ever, Lacey never really addressed how rubbish she was to her friend and it felt like Theo was happy for things to stay that way. So many elements of this book are good so it seems a shame to rate it so low, but I just couldn't enjoy it the way it was written.

Overall Rating:

.5

Midwinter Mysteries by Assorted Authors

I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher Sapere Books in exchange for an honest review.

I really really love the idea behind this anthology. As far as I can tell, the publishing house behind this book has gotten a bunch of mystery/crime authors to write some short stories showcasing their characters in order to promote the series they write. This is a very cool idea and I think it's a great way to potentially find a new series you might really enjoy. Sadly most of these stories ended up not being for me.

I would say loosely that almost all of these are either a) police procedurals, b) historical mysteries or a c) a combination of both. With the exception of the very first story, I probably enjoyed the historical ones slightly more since I tend to lean towards historical crime fiction (unlike thrillers where I like modern day). My main problem with these is they were all incredibly short. This made it very difficult to get into the stories and also to get a taste of what the authors' true styles were. It felt like a story was just getting going and then it would end abruptly, sometimes without a sense that there had been an actual mystery involved.

Perhaps because of these stories using pre-established characters, there was also a lack of introduction of most of the cast and/or plot elements surrounding the stories themselves. This didn't help with getting into the stories either (again, the first story actually did introduce people fairly well and was one of my favourites for this reason).

Overall, this is a decent but all too brief collection of stories. They all fall a little short in various ways but the anthology was still moderately enjoyable and I do really like the idea behind it. I just wish everything was a little bit longer.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Secret Santa by Trish Harnetiaux

I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher Random House UK, Cornerstone in exchange for an honest review.

Tis the season for grizzly murder! Christmas-themed thrillers are becoming increasingly prevalent it seems and this is definitely a trend I support. I love reading seasonal books and while the odd contemporary romance is enjoyable, if I can read holiday books in the genres I love then it's even better. I was very excited when I got my e-ARC of The Secret Santa because the premise sounded great. At a Christmas party, the guests have a White Elephant exchange and someone gets more than they bargained for when a gift relating to someone's dark past is unwrapped.

Sadly this book ended up being a huge disappointment. The writing style itself is pretty good. It flows well and the important characters are set up nicely. My only problem with that is that there are three POV characters and two of them are told in the third person and one is told in the first which is a bit of an odd choice.

The HUGE problem with this book is that characters are still unwrapping their presents 80% of the way through. The sinister gift from the blurb is only revealed at this point and then the ending is incredibly pedestrian following that event since there are very few pages left to deal with the fallout. I feel this would have been a much stronger story if the present opening had happened earlier and we really got a sense of tension and paranoia building between characters. Instead it all falls a bit flat which is such a shame.

Overall, I can't really recommend this book beyond a short read to kill some time around the holiday season. I would actually potentially pick up more by this author because there are some really good elements here but the plot is lacking almost entirely and that is too big an issue to overlook.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Family by Louise Jensen

I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher HQ in exchange for an honest review.

The Family is a thriller about a cult, a subject I've not read a lot about in my fiction but I've really enjoyed when I have. I was expecting this thriller to have a different tone than it did and I think that affected my enjoyment of it quite a lot. This book is off to a slow start, focusing on Laura and her daughter Tilly who are recently bereaved of their husband/father. Laura is in a tough position financially until she is offered help from the mysterious group of people who live on the outskirts of her town. But to what extent can she trust them?

Parts of this book were really badly written which shocks me as Louise Jensen has always had such strong writing in the past. The main reason I couldn't gel with it was the plot though. It seemed to have an odd pace with a dragging beginning and end section. I won't spoil anything that happens as this is a thriller, but particularly at the end the reveals got a little ridiculous. A lot of coincidences are crucial to specific things that happen which might leave a sour taste in some readers' mouths.

Overall, I sadly can't really recommend this book. It has alright characters and some decent moments but there were too many things which prevented me from getting into the story. If you're going to read a Jensen book, I recommend one of her other ones.

Overall Rating:

.5

Hunting Annabelle

I received an ARC of this book thanks to Net Galley and publisher Harlequin-Mira in exchange for an honest review.

It is so hard for me to pin down how I felt about this book. On the one hand, I felt it was fairly well-written and I was definitely engaged throughout most of it. On the other hand, I absolutely hated the ending and felt like it got very rambly and repetitive about 50% of the way through.

One thing I would like to make clear is that this should definitely be considered a YA thriller. Hunting Annabelle is about a teenager named Sean with severe mental health difficulties (labelled schizophrenia but as a psychologist, I'm not entirely convinced). Sean meets a girl called Annabelle, goes on a date with her and then sees her get kidnapped in front of his eyes. He goes straight to the police but due to his mental health difficulties and some dark things from his past, they don't believe him. He then decides to take matters into his own hands and investigates her disappearance.

For the first half or so of this book, I was very engaged and intrigued by the story. I don't really enjoy reading thrillers with unreliable narrators anymore because I tend to just switch off and wait until the author reveals what really happened at the end, but Sean's potential hallucinations are sort of kept to a minimum and aren't too intrusive. The mental health rep in this is pretty shocking but then, I don't expect a lot from thrillers. There is a fair amount of accuracy in terms of treatment and that side of things but the actual details about the condition are few and far between. Maybe this was meant to add to the ambiguity aspect but it felt lacking to me. I can definitely see it angering some people.

The problems start to kick in around 50% of the way through. Firstly, the story becomes incredibly repetitive. Sean goes to meet someone from Annabelle's past, he finds out a little more about her and then he gets the name of the next person to go see. Rinse and repeat for like 100 pages. Secondly, Sean discovers something very incriminating about a person in Annabelle's life which seems like it would be important to the investigation. An intense fight happens and Sean escapes with evidence of this incriminating thing and then...nothing happens? It isn't mentioned properly until the very end and it's incredibly distracting to have this plot device just hanging there like the elephant in the corner. I initially expected this encounter to be a hallucination of Sean which would explain why it was just forgotten about but this turns out not to be the case and it's just a really baffling writing decision.

This review is spoiler free but the final and biggest problem with this book is the ending. I found it very unbelievable and frankly a bit of a cop-out, and it soured the tone of the whole book for me. Overall, I can see some people really liking this book but I'm just not convinced it brings anything new to the thriller genre. I think the writing has real potential and there are a lot of nice elements at the start of the book. I would want to read more by the author but I can't really recommend this to people, and the problems far outweigh the good points. Sadly this was not a winner.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Extinction Trials by S.M. Wilson

Ooh boy. So when I first saw this book, it was on Amazon and I presumed it was self-published. You see that little sticker on the cover that says 'The Hunger Games meets Jurassic Park'? Yeah, this book is literally a rip-off of the Hunger Games premise only stupider and now there are dinosaurs. Imagine my utter surprise when I walk into Waterstones and see this being promoted. It's a real book alright.

Of course I had to read it. The main character is called STORMCHASER KNOX. She has PURPLE EYES. There are DINOSAURS. So I picked up this book expecting a good laugh. I certainly got that but to my surprise, it was much better written than I was expecting.

There are many elements that make up a book. Let me be clear-the writing style of this book is actually pretty good. Everything else varies from just kind of silly to genuinely bad, but this got a much higher rating overall than I was expecting and so the author deserves some credit for that. They deserve absolutely no credit whatsoever for the nonsensical worldbuilding however. The plot of this book makes zero sense and it just goes downhill from there. So Stormchaser is our main character. She is a firm loner without a family and only one best friend to speak of. You remember how Katniss had to enter the Hunger Games to save her sister? Well, Stormchaser chooses to go to an island of dinosaurs entirely voluntarily. Her friends/competitors on the island all have better motivations than her, and yet she's still desperate to win and steal the prize from them. That sure is one likable protagonist!

This fictional world is so confusing as well. I think it's maybe meant to be set in the future but that makes no sense. Even being kind and assuming it takes place in an alternate timeline doesn't help much. In this universe, there are only two continents-one for people and one for dinosaurs. The people continent is running out of space so they want to conquer the dinosaur continent using the mystical power of...DNA. Apparently the only way to get DNA is to steal a dinosaur egg. Not a single character in this book goes into any detail about DNA and I can only assume the author has no idea what it is or how it works. Anyway, the whole premise of the Extinction Trials is that people volunteer to go to the dinosaur continent and then undergo some physical and mental tests to determine their suitability. The top 100 then go to the island, the majority die every year and then the survivors get free food for them and their families. That is the only incentive for applying, and while that is a good incentive if you have hundreds of siblings, it is not a good motivation for Stormchaser.

The ending is the dumbest part of all and I'm going to need to spoil some things.

SPOILERS AHEAD

So as mentioned, Stormchaser has no reason to enter beyond her desire to see the world of dinosaurs. Her surviving teammates on the island include her love interest who has a sick sister, and this other guy who has his own family to feed, plus the families of several dead teammates that he's promised to pretend are his own. When they return from the island, they are the only people with an egg (they actually have two which is important). The evil scientists in charge then change the prize so that all three of them can't win; instead, two of them must claim an egg and those two will get a prize. For some reason love interest claims both eggs, then Storm claims both eggs and then other guy claims one and says Storm got the other. To sort this out, they make everyone compete in further challenges (which are nowhere near as intense as the narrative implies they're going to be). Storm takes part in these and WINS. She voluntarily beats out two guys with legitimate reasons to win because...she wants to?

END OF SPOILERS

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by this book. Granted that isn't saying much given that my expectations were rock bottom, but it's enjoyable enough and I can see kids liking this quite a lot. If you want a genuinely good dystopian novel though you will have to look elsewhere. For a 'so good it's bad' read however, this could be great.

Overall Rating:

.5

First We Were IV by Alexandra Sirowy

God, this book was such a disappointment. I have so many books by Alexandra Sirowy on my to-read list and now I'm finding it hard to muster up enthusiasm for any of them. I just could not get into the writing style of this book and it got to the point where I almost didn't finish reading it, which is a Huge Deal for me. But the narrative style is off-putting, rambly and faux-poetic in  a way which creates a kind of pretentious, dreamy atmosphere. In short, it is the exact kind of style I can't stand. And this is mostly due to personal taste but to be honest, even excluding that I don't think this book has a lot to offer.

Plotwise, I found it very difficult to follow what was going on. This was mostly due to the writing style as I mentioned above but it was also because no one was really acting like a real person or making sense within their motivations. The basic plot is that these four outcasts decide to form a psuedo-cult to get the town to pay attention to the murder of a girl which happened years ago. Everyone at school, particularly the popular kids who have been bullying them for years, becomes desperate to join this cult and will do crazy things to get into it. This already requires too much suspension of disbelief on my part. There is no natural transition between the popular kids hating them to idolising their weird club. It happens mostly because of a semi-naked bonfire dance and what??? That is not the kind of thing that will get the popular people clamoring to take part in something. If anything, it should ostracise them even more as weirdos.

Characterisation was another big problem. Are we meant to hate the bully characters? Conner is despicable but when he starts to want to join the club, I get the impression that the narration wants us to think he's maybe not so bad? Viv is just the worst and has nothing relatable or sympathetic about her. Graham made me so uncomfortable in his attraction and attitude towards Izzie and gave off serious 'nice guy entitlement' vibes. I actually did like Harry right up until an incredibly nonsensical and stupid decision he makes near the end. Finally, Izzie would have been okay if she'd been written more clearly. I know ambiguity is meant to be a part of it but I couldn't really understand how she felt about Graham or Conner or several other important things. That's not ambiguity, that's bad writing. I should understand the main character's motivations, even if they're not clarified until the end. Instead they just don't get clarified at all.

Overall, I just don't get what people like about this book. I guess if you're a fan of the overly-descriptive and poetic writing style, you might get something out of this. It had some potentially good plot elements and the core idea could have worked with some tweaking. Sadly this was not a book for me.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Trap by Melanie Raabe

The Trap has the kind of intriguing, meta premise that drew me right in. Unfortunately, it was a little like being trapped into reading it. It is a book about an author writing a book to trap the killer of her sister. The main character is a reclusive author and when she thinks she sees her sister's killer reporting the news on TV, she decides to write a crime book and get that reporter to interview her, hoping that reading a book about the murder he committed will get him to confess.

First of all, I feel I should say that this book is pretty weird at points. It has a strange false-start thing early on where you think something is happening (and something that goes on for quite some time) only to suddenly be told by the narrator that they were imagining how something would play out. This felt like a complete waste of my time and instantly made me wary when I was reading anything else that was going on, in case that also turned out to be not real.

The book unfortunately drags a lot too which is very weird given how relatively short it is. It really doesn't have much meat to the story at all and the pacing suffers massively because of it. I thought I would breeze through it due to the length but it turned out to take me longer than usual because there just isn't much going on. Half the wordcount is taken up by the in-story book that the main character is writing and to be honest, I skipped almost all of those sections. Maybe it would have added some extra depth to the story if I'd done more than skim them but from what I did read, it really didn't seem like it.

Overall, I think this book had the potential to be really great but the author didn't know what to do with the premise beyond the basic idea. There is a throwaway line at the end about how the main character hasn't really written a crime story but a different kind of story (not revealed because no spoiler review) and this was clearly meant to be some clever meta commentary on the actual book. However, it just falls flat because really this book isn't any kind of genre particularly. For a thriller, there aren't enough twists or tense moments. The crime aspect is not focused on, nor are any of the relationships particularly developed.  Even for its short wordcount, this book doesn't deliver on the story and for that reason I can't recommend it.

Overall Rating:

.5

One Was Lost by Natalie D. Richards

I was so disappointed by this book! I mean look at that gorgeous cover. To be fair, I had forgotten this book was YA going into it so I was expecting more of an actual thriller tone. You can definitely tell that this is a YA book. I also found the first few chapters incredibly hard to get into. Something about the writing style and the way things are introduced is very messy at the start and I was a bit confused until I got settled into it.

Apart from that slight niggle, this really isn't a badly written book in terms of style. The characters were fairly interesting and I was intrigued anytime the story chose to focus on them. Unfortunately, the big weakness of this book is the thriller aspect. I'm not going to spoil anything but the ending is incredibly obvious and it's almost painful how long it takes the main characters to work things out. There are the obvious double-meaning conversations where characters will not say things properly, so the main character will jump to a conclusion which you know as the reader is going to turn out to be false because the conversation was so vague.

The existence of the other camp is a factor I think was greatly underused. It does show up in the plot eventually but only to provide some new suspects, which are promptly abandoned a few pages later. Further exploration of this would have helped the story and potentially made the actual solution a lot less obvious. This also applies to the side characters as well come to think of it. Each character is kind of developed in turn, briefly becomes a suspect and then is pushed to one side. It's a shame because they really had the potential to be interesting characters.

Alas I don't really have much more to say about this book. I may explore other titles from this author because there was nothing wrong with the writing style or the characters, and she may have the potential to write better stuff with a different plot. Sadly the failure of a compelling mystery is too big a flaw for me to ignore.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Good Twin by Marti Green

I received an ARC from Net Galley and publisher Thomas & Mercer in exchange for an honest review.

I was honestly so disappointed by this! So the twin/thriller thing has been done to death and this doesn't exactly have the most original plot. However, that gorgeous cover and the potential for a good story sucked me. After all, I don't really mind how original my thrillers are in premise so long as they keep me entertained. Unfortunately due to a poor writing style, The Good Twin barely did that.

It is ultimately the writing that lets this book down. The characters are very flat and don't feel like actual people at all. It switches between focusing on Mallory and Ben, but Mallory's chapters are written from her POV and Ben's chapters are in third person. This makes for a very jarring reading experience. I can only assume this was done so we could tell who the focus was on without the chapters saying 'Mallory' and 'Ben' all the time, but it's really not a great solution.

You also then get flashback chapters from Charley's POV which don't add much new to the story and you have the whole thing of having to go over events you've already read about. This is a good chunk of the book and it just feels like you're waiting to catch up with the present again. Out of all three of the main characters, Charley is probably the best written but that isn't saying much.

My other major problem with this book is that it swaps plots a fair bit in the standard twisty thriller way. The issue with this is I was far more interested in the story I thought I was getting before the twists happened. I liked the whole 'can I really trust them?' aspect of both Ben and Mallory's interactions, and the same thing at the end part too (not going into detail because I don't want to spoil but it should be clear what I mean if you've read it). The first twist has been done to death in books like this while I haven't really read many books that cover the whole 'can I trust my partner in crime?' thing.

Overall, this book isn't bad enough to really annoy me but it was a bit of a slog to get through. There isn't really anything positive that would make me recommend it. It's passable but there are far better thrillers to pick up.

Overall Rating:

.5

Aftercare Instructions by Bonnie Pipkin

I received an ARC from Net Galley and publisher Legend Press in exchange for an honest review.

I'm a little confused because I got this book from Net Galley where is is apparently being released on the 3rd May 2018. However, Goodreads says it was published 27th June 2017. Oh well.

This is a bit of an odd read for me. Genesis (I hate that name so much) is a girl with many problems in her life-her dad died of an overdose, her mother is suicidal and her boyfriend ran out and left her at the abortion clinic. This book focuses on her dealing with the latter problem and adjusting to the idea of a life without her boyfriend. Despite the intense subject matter, this is actually a rather detached book which makes it easier reading than it might have otherwise been. The characters are okay but they don't really cross the line into feeling like real people, perhaps with the exception of Gen herself. This isn't necessarily a flaw-in a book like this, too much focus on character would have been very difficult to read and distracting from the main character. On the other hand, anyone who isn't Gen is a bit flat.

There isn't a whole lot of plot here but that's okay. I enjoyed the flashbacks to before the abortion being told through the medium of play scripts. It was a nice touch and it came across like Gen dealing with her pain through distancing herself from it by writing the scripts. I don't know if that was the intention but I appreciated it all the same.

So why isn't this rated higher? Honestly, it's mostly because of things it lacks rather than mistakes it makes. Not much attention is given to things like developing Gen's friends as characters and so when we do get vague details about them, it can be confusing. Ditto Gen's family situation. We know her sister moved out and Gen misses her but only because we are told these things explicitly. We're never shown Gen being close with her sister or missing her particularly. A similar thing happens with Peter's mum hating Gen. We get one script scene flashback but the rest is all told to us.

Overall, I don't regret reading this book. It's an interesting read and I wasn't really sure where it was going, both of which are good. It's a shame I couldn't rate it higher but it just doesn't have that life to it that makes me love a book.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Merry Spinster by Mallory Ortberg

This book was so disappointing! Look at that beautiful cover. It has a cool (if not overdone) premise to match-twisted retelling of fairytales. Alas, many of the stories in this are just not up to scratch.

This is a relatively short collection and so I'm going to do things a little differently to how I normally review short stories. Instead of going over each story in detail, I'm just going to talk about them generally in comparison to each other and similar things I've read.

So the first story is definitely one of the strongest and unfortunately this led to a large part of my disappointment. 'The Daughter Cells' is kind of like if Lemony Snicket retold The Little Mermaid and all the dark joy that implies. It had a bunch of quotable stuff and used the fairytale to make matter-of-fact, humourous commentary on society. I was hoping all the stories would have this tone and while they kind of do, very few have such a coherent and detailed story to go along with it.

'The Thankless Child' is next (a retelling of Cinderella sort of) and I enjoyed it enough until the ending happened. It was very abrupt and I had no idea what it meant, despite reading it twice. This highlights one of the main issues with many of these stories-they don't appear to have a point. This could be because they are all mixes of several tales (the inspiration for each story is listed at the back which is very cool) and so having not read a lot of the original tales, it may be that stuff gets lost for me. However, I don't believe this is a valid excuse as the story really should stand alone.

'Fear Not' was amusing, yet confusing again and forgettable (although it was inspired by the Bible and so felt like one of the more unique tales). 'The Six Boy Coffins' was finally another story that had a decent plot and a clear ending. This was extremely powerful and again, it used the fairytale element to make a comment about society in a very strong way.

'The Rabbit' follows this and was my favourite story in the whole collection. It is a seriously creepy retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit and I think the simplicity of focusing on one story works in its favour. I will not be forgetting that one anytime soon.

'The Merry Spinster' was a very pointless retelling of Beauty and the Beast with an amusing writing style but it really went absolutely nowhere. I don't even remember 'The Wedding Party' (I finished this book two days ago) and the remaining four stories are all very similar in that they are creepy but again, ultimately pointless or unclear in what they are trying to say.

Overall, I wish I could love this collection more. It has a few really good stories and it shows so much promise in terms of Ortberg's writing style. I just wish it wasn't so hit and miss.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn

SPOILERS AHEAD (Technically. You should be able to figure this one out anyway but yeah)

What do I do with this book? On the one hand, A. J. Finn is a very talented writer and I was completely sucked into the world of this book. On the other hand, the plot absolutely sucked. I mean, for a thriller this was bad. Let me tell you, there is nothing more frustrating than when you're reading a thriller and you've figured out the 'twist' because it's insanely obvious and yet the main character remains painfully oblivious. The Woman in the Window is a particularly bad example of this because there are literally only two possibilities and the character completely glosses over one of them.

So, let me introduce you to the main plot. An agoraphobic drunk woman named Anna meets her neighbour's wife, sees her being murdered a few days later and then is told by the police and everyone else that she has never actually met his wife who is now a completely different woman. The main character insists the new woman can't be his wife, even when papers are produced showing she undeniably is. So the other possibility you immediately come to is that the first woman wasn't his wife and was in fact lying while this new woman is his wife.

Not if you're this main character!

Instead she continues on for hundreds of pages wondering who this new woman is instead of focusing on the identity of the victim. It is very frustrating to read and it means that the first intended 'twist' of her realising the first woman was lying and not the second comes off as anticlimatic and very poorly done. This is especially bad when the second major twist also turns out to be fairly guessable, though admittedly not to the extent of the first. Even so, the reveal that Ethan is the evil killer all along falls very flat and is unsatisfying. It is extremely easy to guess that the person Anna has been talking to online is a fake and is fishing for information, to the point where again you wonder why the supposedly smart Anna isn't making these simple connections.

The other major problem of this book can be defined as a distinct lack of originality. The main character reeks of the protagonist from The Girl on the Train, what with them both being alcoholics who witness a murder through a window and have their testimony doubted due to their substance abuse. This is even more obvious when you consider both protagonists jump to the wrong conclusions about the married couple they spy on. The other obvious influence is Rear Window. Anna is obsessed with old black and white movies and does mention Hitchcock several times, and yet she never draws direct parallels between Rear Window and her own situation. I actually enjoyed the constant use of movie quotes at first and thought it was quite a nice character quirk to include in a thriller, but said quotes quickly become overused near the end and the lack of the connection is honestly baffling. A throwaway line about it might have been cheap but at least it would have been something.

You may have noticed that neither of the things I have mentioned are what you could call small problems. By all rights I should hate this book for being a dumb, derivative, forgettable work.

AND YET.

By god this book is well-written. I didn't think much of it at the time beyond it being really compelling and hard to put down but honestly, this author deserves some kudos. They have an obvious plot with obvious twists and somehow I still enjoyed every minute of the characters and writing style. I guessed the first twist astonishingly early on but I still read eagerly, keen to find out what was going to happen. Then I guessed the second and third twists and yet I still read on. I minded a lot but it didn't make me rush through it or roll my eyes every other sentence like some thrillers I've read. Anna may be a bit of an idiot but she is likeable and has some decent depth to her. Also this book is much longer than the average thriller but it didn't feel like it for one second. I really, really hope this author writes more and writes something with a far better plot because he could go so far.

Overall, I am left with very conflicted feelings about this book. I cannot ignore its very painful and crucial flaws but I can't dismiss it as thriller trash either. Is it worth reading? Maybe. Do I regret reading it? Definitely not. This is the first book of 2018 I'm reading as part of my 'new releases, new reviews' schtick and it seems to be carrying on the noble tradition of not being that great. However, there are some really fantastic elements in here and I can't fault it too hard thanks to those. In terms of thrillers, you could do a whole lot worse.

Overall Rating:

.5

A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares by Krystal Sutherland

Oh boy, this was a really tough book to get into. This is the perfect example of the kind of book which irritates me. At the start, every single character is so impossibly quirky that I genuinely almost stopped reading. If you manage to plough through then this is toned down a little bit but these characters are still very much more quirk than personality. Esther is particularly unbearable. She dresses up as a different character each day and I just couldn't find what little personality she had relatable at all. Jonah is better but unfortunately, he is the best it gets.

Once that awful beginning section is over, the book does improve a little. I still struggle to understand what it is trying to say though. So the blurb implies a little magical realism and the story makes it very unclear if this is the case or not for quite some time. This is definitely not a strength. I dislike the way it portrays mental illness and I especially don't like that everyone is Esther's life has their own unique quirky brand of mental illness either. Her mum is a compulsive gambler, her dad is agoraphobic, her brother is afraid of the dark-even her best friend is mute but only to Esther.

There is a distinct lack of people trying to deal with their problems in this book, even after Jonah comes into Esther's life to magically help her fix everything. The characters are extremely damaging to Esther because of their mental health (for example, her mother loses all of their money and her 'best friend' refuses to physically speak around only her but will talk to everyone else) and this is done particularly badly. There isn't really a sympathetic portrayal of those being so awful to Esther, and yet Esther doesn't try to convince them to seek help or anything and just kind of accepts the behaviour as it is. It's the worst of both worlds.

Overall, I did grow to enjoy reading this book but there are so many problems with it that I find it difficult to recommend. It is pretty unique in both story and style, and there is enough to keep you reading if you can get through the unbearable quirkiness being rammed down your throat. It's just a shame that it fails to deliver on so many levels.

Overall Rating:

.5