The Girl from Widow Hills by Megan Miranda

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

I really struggled to get into this book. The Girl from Widow Hills is the story of Olivia, a woman who famously survived a flash flood as a child and changed her identity to escape the press. Her past comes back to haunt her when she finds the corpse of someone relating to her past in her garden and she becomes involved in a murder case. The main reason I couldn't get into this book is I found the plot both linear and hard to care about. The main character keeps the reader at a distance and that made it incredibly hard for me to either sympathise with her or trust her narration. I spent the whole book just waiting for her to actually let me in on what was going on properly.

I also found Olivia's relationships with the other characters very odd. She had a previous romance with her college professor but he was involved so little in the story that I kept forgetting he existed. She might have bene trying to start a romance with her work colleague but I couldn't tell if it was meant to be romantic, even with the main character stating she might like to date him. This links back to the way Olivia was written and me not trusting what she was telling the reader. I didn't buy her relationship with her colleague and it felt like she was plotting something she wasn't letting me know about. Finally, she has a friendship of sorts with her neighbour Rick. At first I was also unsure if this was romantic, especially given that she is stated to prefer older men. It is platonic but again, I never really felt or understood the connection between the two of them.

The plot itself is fine in terms of content, but I never felt particularly compelled or intrigued by it. You don't really know what is going on but the book also doesn't encourage you to try and guess either, meaning that as a reader I was disconnected. On the surface this is a fine enough thriller but I think Miranda has much stronger books (The Perfect Stranger, Fragments of the Lost) and this just didn't do enough for me personally. It's a shame but I still look forward to reading her other books.

Overall Rating:

The Stranger's Wife by Anna-Lou Weatherley

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

This book really did not gel with me. I did finish it but it was a definite slog and I skim-read about 40% of it. There was just nothing in the plot which I found particularly gripping and, while the characters were alright, I wasn't invested enough to make up for the lack of good story. The two female characters described in the blurb don't meet until about 60% of the way through the book and once they do, things become very pedestrian. I also feel the plot they hatched made no sense? I could see no advantage to what they did. So disappointing!

Overall Rating:

Girls of Storm and Shadow by Natasha Ngan

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

I'm going to be honest, I wasn't blown away by Girls of Paper and Fire. I did really enjoy the book and I thought it had a lot of potential but there were some little niggles that kept getting in the way of me loving it. I was hoping the sequel would fix these niggles and bring more of what I loved, and it did to some extent.

Girls of Storm and Shadow is a very different book to the first one in the series. The plot focuses mainly on the growing threat of war and our band of heroes travelling round, trying to recruit others to their cause. I must admit, I'm not a huge fan of these kinds of plots which probably tainted my opinion a bit. What I did enjoy was the characterisation present here and the direction the characters were taken in. One of my main niggles with the first book was the relationship between the protagonist and her love interest, which was a little flat and had an unpleasant 'victim blaming' angle to it. Thankfully this is fixed in this book, and while there are other reasons I found it hard to root for the couple, I do at least find it interesting the direction Ngan has chosen to take it.

The writing in general is strong and I think there is enough happening in this book to keep you engaged. As much as I thought the relationship of Wren and Lei took a step in the right direction, there are still some very prominent issues. In this book Lei is waaaay too forgiving of Wren, to the point where it is sort of unbelievable. Lei doesn't tend to react the way one typically would to finding out certain things about her lover, and the plot suffers for it. Lei herself has somewhat questionable morals as well. At one point she refuses to kill a known enemy who is attacking her but a few chapters later, she slaughters a much more innocent person in self-defense and barely bats an eyelid.

Sadly this book did not convince me to continue on with the series, though I am still a little intrigued to see where it's all going. I wish the plot of the first book had tied in more closely to the plot of this one, and it seems the third one will have to jump a fair bit if it is going to be the last in the series. I did think the sexual assault aspects that were handled poorly in the first book are handled well in this one (although still treated as a minor plot thread) which is an improvement. Try as I might, I just can't get sucked into this world though.

Overall Rating:

The Honeymoon by Rona Halsall

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

Oh boy, this was a rough read. If you ever want a textbook definition of 'idiot plot', then sadly this is it. I was pretty excited to read this book because it sounded like a brilliant atmospheric thriller. Having married a man after only two months with him, Chloe goes on her honeymoon and things take a scary dive. I expected from the blurb that this would be a book about a husband holding his new wife hostage and, while that's kind of true, that's not what the focus of the plot is on. Instead of a hostage story you kind of get a back and forth between Chloe being determined to try and make her marriage work and her almost freaking out at her new husband's behaviour.

I say 'almost' because the biggest problem this book has is without a doubt the characters. Not a single character acted how a real person would and it made everything very hard to swallow. So Chloe has just married Dan, a man she doesn't know very well. Immediately after their wedding, he changes their honeymoon destination without telling her. He then takes away her phone, refuses to let her open the windows and behaves very oddly in general. Chloe chronically undereacts to everything. Even when pretty life-altering stuff is happening later on in the plot, she never reacts more than someone would to discovering they were out of milk. This is not, as I first thought, an attempt to accurately portray how some women can act in an abusive situation. This is just poor characterisation.

The same goes for Dan. He repeatedly claims that he needs to 'keep Chloe safe' but refuses to explain anything to her, just so the reader can go on wondering if he's paranoid or if he really is a good guy. There is zero romantically appealing about him and that makes it tough to sympathise with Chloe to any degree. Chloe also has a gran who is possibly one of the most selfish people ever. When Chloe seeks her out having had some pretty awful things happen to her, her gran just waves her off back to her new husband and tells her to leave her alone. Granted her gran isn't meant to be ideal but she's a lot worse than the narrative seems to imply she is.

The real unbelievable nature of it all comes to light with the sheer amount of insanity that happens in the last few chapters. In the space of a few pages HIGHLIGHT FOR SPOILERS Chloe is threatened by a madman, kills him, has a child, gets back together with Dan, Dan murders her gran for the money, Chloe leaves him again and then Dan is hit by a car. You keep expecting the story to end since it feels like it has come to its natural conclusion and then another thing forces the plot to keep on going.

Overall, I would sadly not recommend this thriller. Maybe it could have worked with stronger writing or characterisation but the plot itself is fairly weak and I'm not sure it would be worth salvaging. It's a shame because I love summer-themed thrillers but there are far better examples out there than this one.

Overall Rating:

.5

The Stranger Inside by Laura Benedict

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

Oh boy, this was a rough read. And it started off so promising! The Stranger Inside is about what happens when a woman comes home from a long break to discover someone else is living in her house. That alone is a great thriller premise but unfortunately that's pretty much the only great thing about this book.

A lot of other reviews have complained about the main character, Kimber, being incredibly unlikable. This actually didn't bother me much because a) I don't think anyone deserves horrible things to happen to them and so I have a high tolerance for terrible people in thrillers, and b) Kimber was so flat that she didn't have much of a personality for me to dislike. I just could not understand her actions at any point. From the very first chapter, the way she reacts to someone being in her house is just..off.

There is also unfortunately a serious case of the plot only happening because certain people act like morons. Pretty early on Kimber discovers something which could get the stranger out of her house. Does she tell the police? Nope. Instead she keeps it to herself and decides to investigate and continue not being allowed to live in her house. I understand curiousity but what she knows about the stranger isn't intriguing enough at this point for her to want to investigate further. From that point onwards I was just frustrated because everything could be stopped if only Kimber went to the police with what she knew.

The other major problem is that this book really dragged for me. This is a combination of poor pacing, a dull protagonist and a really weird way of doing plot reveals. One spoiler-free example goes like this: Kimber finds out the name of the stranger in her house. A flashback chapter then reveals who that stranger is in regards to her life. Then in the present day, Kimber finds out who that person is through a friend. Then another character tells her who that person is. Then she finds evidence to confirm who that person is. Then another character tells her who the person is. This is the same bit of information talked about again and again with no new details, and we have to sit through characters talking about stuff we already know.

The ending as a whole was a mess. There is one very weak 'twist' which you actually again, get told earlier on through narration. This basically amounts to Kimber going at one point 'Hmm, that mysterious person reminds me of X. But that's silly haha.' and then at the end, 'Omg, that mysterious person is X! Who could have seen this coming?'. I came dangerously close to not finishing reading this and I skimmed the end as a result. The final few pages hold another 'twist' which just erases a pretty major thing and it's about as awful as that sounds.

I really don't feel good when I dislike ARCs that I've requested but sadly, The Stranger Inside just did not do it for me. If characters really aren't important to you and you don't mind not being surprised by a thriller, then you might get more enjoyment out of this than I did,

Overall Rating:

Method 15/33 by Shannon Kirk

Ooh boy, it has been a while since I've struggled this much to finish a book. Honestly I was so close to DNFing it that I basically skim read the last 100 pages (and it only has about 200 to begin with).

This is not really a thriller. I mean it is but there are zero thrills to be had here. The plot is exactly what the blurb says without any additional twists or surprises. I'm not necessarily someone who believes a thriller needs to have a huge twist to be good but it at least has to be interesting. This could have been an intense story about a pregnant teenage girl trying to escape from kidnappers but our main character recounts the entire thing with all the detached disinterest of someone talking about what they had for breakfast. Speaking of which, the main character of this was awful. I can't even say that I hated her because she didn't have enough of a presence to hate.

So there are two narrators in this book-a 18 year old pregnant teenager and a 30-something year old male FBI agent. Both of these characters are written with the exact same voice. Our teenage protagonist is meant to be 'emotionally gifted' in that she can switch her emotions on and off whenever she likes, and this is quite possibly the most baffling character choice I have ever encountered. All of the potential tension of the story is completely dissolved by having an emotionless main character. How am I meant to root for her? Where is the emotional core of the story? Instead of two protagonists to root for, you get two bland and uninteresting narrators. 50 pages in I already didn't care about either of them.

As mentioned above, the entire plot is very one-note.There is nothing after page 100 to keep you reading and if you're hoping for some kind of plot twist (or even a new development in a story which is over by that point), you're not going to get it. This book is not worth even glancing at to be brutally honest. There are far better stories about people being kidnapped and many, many thrillers more worthy of attention.

Overall Rating:

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

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

SPOILERS AHEAD.

Oh boy. I am not going to win any fans for this one. So this book has been on my TBR list for four years now. One of my closest friends recommended it to me waaaay back in first year of university and I earnestly promised to read it as he said it was one of his favourite books. Flash forward to 2018-the movie is coming out and I am reminded of this book's existence. I excitedly text him to say I'm finally starting to read it and I begin.

Aaaaaaaaah.

This book is bad. Painfully bad. Reading it is like being punched in the stomach by someone you hate only you're not allowed to complain about it because you have only yourself to blame. The only way I can accurately do my hatred of this book justice is to break it down into subtitles so apologies if it seems disjointed. There is just a LOT of ground to cover.

Plot Summary

The setting is 2045 and the world has gone to crap. Our protagonist is a teenage boy named Wade Watts, an orphan who spends all of his time in an online virtual world called the Oasis. That's all everyone does now-that and make endless 80s references. You see, the guy who made the Oasis died and left behind a video saying he would give 240 billion (yes, BILLION) dollars to whoever finds his hidden Easter egg first. In order to have a chance of finding this Easter egg, you have to memorise every piece of pop culture from the 80s ever. No that isn't a joke. Wade is the biggest geek and therefore of course will undertake the quest to find the egg first. By 'quest' I mean spending four years watching and reading stuff, then finally getting off his ass to do something.

Problem #1-SO MUCH EIGHTIES

Many people appear to love this book because of the endless references to everything nerdy. These people are severely misguided. You see, Cline employs the absolute laziness way of referencing stuff which is to just namecheck everything in a massive stream of pop culture vomit. If the reference isn't included as part of an obnoxiously long list, then you can bet it will be inserted into a paragraph of description in the most distracting way possible. Characters, places, even the music in tense scenes is replaced with a reference to a better work of fiction.

'She was so charming. Her geeky demeanor and hyperkinetic speech pattern reminded me of Jordan, my favorite character in Real Genius'

How distracting is that? It fails on two counts because if you don't get the reference, well you suck for not being nerdy enough (more on that later). If you do get the reference however, then you can't possibly think of anything other than the character from that movie from then onward. It ruins any description Cline does bother to write and it jerks you out of the story like a car crash.

Problem #2-Show don't tell

So the finding of the first key is kind of glossed over a bit (I mean, if you can call 10 chapters or so 'glossed over') which I guess is done because finding it is a given. Unfortunately this results in one of the worst narrative mistakes an author can make and that is simply telling the reader about stuff instead of bothering to describe it. It's honestly baffling when Wade finds out the location of the first key, calculates it will take him three days to get there and then just immediately comes up with an alternative plan. Then he teleports there and makes his way through a dungeon in the space of a sentence. Cline literally lists him finding loot until he reaches the big boss of the dungeon and it's such a bizarre decision. I guess it's because if you've played the game he's referencing, that would be rather dull to read about. Alas it is dull anyway and you could have done so much cool stuff with detailing Wade's journey and have him battling things. Even fans of the game could have enjoyed in-depth references.

This is not a one-off either. Too often the author resorts to simply listing things or skimming over certain details. I don't need to read about everything but why bring something up instead of simply using a time skip or a change of scene? This is also linked closely with the next problem...

Problem #3-No suspense allowed

For the first half of this book (and even a bit beyond that) the author seems petrified to let the reader experience any kind of suspense. Finding the first key is told with the knowledge that Wade will succeed but that does not excuse things like this happening:

'I breathed a sigh of relief. (I wouldn’t learn until later that the keys were nontransferable. You couldn’t drop one of them, or give them to another avatar. And if you were killed while holding one, it vanished right along with your body.)'

So throughout this scene we're not sure if he's going to be attacked and lose the key he just gained. Then Art3mis tries to attack him and the above sentence happens, immediately removing any kind of suspense. By telling us so early on that keys can't be stolen, it removes so much potential tension from later scenes. Again, stuff like this happens repeatedly.

Problem #4-Wade is too good

The other major reason the story lacks any suspense is that Wade basically never struggles with anything. It is astonishing how many skills this guy supposedly has. He is one of the first people to work out the location of the first key and gets it immediately, even though Art3mis has been trying for five weeks. Granted he struggles with working out the second key but only with working it out. The actual nerd skills needed to complete any challenge, he has in spades. None of these skills are foreshadowed either (beyond us being told repeatedly how awesome and nerdy he is) so every time it's like 'I approached the place, waiting to see what the next challenge would be. It was this thing. Sweet, I'm awesome at this thing.'. I was just waiting for him to encounter something he wasn't amazing at and it never really happened.

At one point when Wade is in hiding and is all depressed, he becomes incredibly obese. He then installs a fitness program onto his virtual system and within months (literally months) he gains abs and becomes very muscular. I can understand having a computer program help you lose weight making it much easier but it's still ridiculous. It doesn't explain how he loses that weight healthily when it's so much in such a short space of time. It's just another thing that he does effortlessly.

Problem #5-No one has that much time

This book is all over the place when it comes to logic and time. So Wade is poor and we're told right at the start of the book that he has to scavenge and sell computers for food since his aunt steals all of his government-issued food. This is then never mentioned again. He also attends school which presumably follows the usual full-time school structure. Four years have passed since the start of the egg hunt and yet somehow Wade has had the time to consume thousands of hours of films, TV shows, books and videogames. How? For example, just one thing Wade claims to have done is watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail 157 times. That is almost ten days worth of watching just one film.

This continues much later on when we're suddenly told that he has had to take on a full-time 40 hour a week job (with 10 hour shifts) and yet he still has time to go into the Oasis all the time and still hunt for the egg. What??? It doesn't make any sense.

Problem #6-Is this even a romance?

Not gonna lie, I have quite a few issues with how Art3mis and Wade's relationship goes down in this book. He has a crush on her before he meets her and when he does meet her, we get some truly cringe-worthy flirting between them.

'“You’re evil, you know that?” I said.

She grinned and shook her head. “Chaotic Neutral, sugar.”'

That line was so bad that it almost ruined the magical idea of romance a lifetime of watching Disney movies has instilled in me.

It does get marginally better but it still really bothers me. Art3mis makes a lot of good points about how Wade only gets to see what she wants him to see since they've only interacted online. And she repeatedly says she looks nothing like her avatar which he repeatedly ignores. Good thing she was lying right? This discussion also leads to one of the most godawful please-can-I-stop-reading moments in the whole damn book:

'Art3mis: How well do you know Aech?

Parzival: He’s been my best friend for five years. Now, spill it. Are you a woman? And by that I mean are you a human female who has never had a sex-change operation?

Art3mis: That’s pretty specific.

Parzival: Answer the question, Claire'

If some guy spoke like that to me, I would never ever speak to him again. This was written in 2011 for god's sake, there's no excuse for transphobia.

Just after the halfway point, we get the obligatory break-up due to Art3mis wanting to focus on the contest (though she is adamant they were never dating, something Wade repeatedly ignores). Wade then bombards her with messages etc to try and get her back. I honestly don't know how the author meant us to interpret this because he does get her in the end but it's not as a result of his behaviour. However, it's still another point against our hero.

I also dislike the faint 'not like other girls' vibe going on in the narration. Wade takes time to point out how Art3mis has a curvy but normal build, unlike EVERY OTHER GIRL who apparently are all either stick-thin or have porn star bodies. Because of course most girls would choose to look like a male fantasy.

Finally, there's a scene where Art3mis and Wade discuss what they would do with the money. Wade says he'd buy a mansion and cool stuff and Art3mis says she would feed all the starving people in the world. You know, because dystopia. Wade MOCKS her for this. This is never really resolved apart from a glib joke by Wade later.

Problem #7-All the other crap

1. There is so much racism in regards to the Japanese characters.

2. Aech is apparently one of the most famous players in the Oasis at the start of the book, has a really cool hangout and yet has no friends apart from Wade.

3. Why do they hang out with I-r0k? Seriously, no one likes him and he exists only to mess stuff up later. Oh, and also so Wade can prove his knowledge in one of the hardest scenes to swallow (I've dealt with a lot of sucky gatekeeper nerd guys in my time).

'I nodded. “The prizes were all mentioned in the Swordquest comic books that came with the games. Comic books which happen to be visible in the treasure room in the final scene of Anorak’s Invitation, by the way.”

The crowd burst into applause. I-r0k lowered his head in shame.'

Never has a scene made me root for a protagonist less.

4. If Halliday intended the true message to be 'don't waste your life in the Oasis', why did he create an impossibly hard contest designed to make everyone spend their time in the Oasis consuming the exact same pop culture he did?

5. Wade says this stupid insult '“Your mom bought them for me,” I retorted without breaking my stride. “Tell her I said thanks, the next time you stop at home to breast-feed and pick up your allowance.”' followed by 'At this school, the only real weapons were words, so I’d become skilled at wielding them'. Skilled. With dialogue like that. Sure.

6. Halliday sounds like an awful awful person. Wade takes the time to point out he fired people for not understanding his references and yeah, that makes him awful.

7. Name-dropping Revenge of the Nerds as a good movie. Gross.

8. Oh look, more problematic stuff:

'“Stop hitting yourself like Rain Man, OK?”'

9. Stop. Making. Wade. So. Unlikeable.

'When I reached the bar, I ordered a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster from the female Klingon bartender and downed half of it. Then I grinned as R2 cued up another classic ’80s tune. “ ‘Union of the Snake,’ ” I recited, mostly out of habit. “Duran Duran. Nineteen eighty-three.”'

10. The weird blob dancing scene.

Final Thoughts

So after all that, how come this book gets two stars and not one? Well to my utter surprise, after about the halfway point this book improves a lot. Almost all of the references vanish (sadly not quite all) and the actual plot becomes the main focus. It's not a bad plot either, and I even found myself enjoying it at times. Sadly this is not enough for me to recommend this book. It wasn't even enough to cancel out the sheer anger it made me feel.

Mild other positives so this doesn't seem so negative-Art3mis is a pretty cool character. I like how she held her own and she was by far the most sensible and relatable person. Aech isn't bad either really. The plot goes in a weird but not unwelcome direction nearish the end and it was certainly different than what I was expecting.

Overall, I am kind of baffled how this book gets any 5 star reviews. From reading them, they all seem to be written by people who are happy with shallow references and enjoy the gatekeeper aspects. As someone who normally loves a clever reference, I am deeply disappointed by the quality on show here.

It's such a shame because the second half of the book shows how good Ready Player One could have been if it wasn't trying so hard. I would have loved to see more creativity and uniqueness within the world of the Oasis. It also desperately needed a less douchey protagonist.

Overall Rating:

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