Tag: Gone Girl

Louise Candlish – The Other Passenger | Review

Title: The Other Passenger

Author: Louise Candlish

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 411

Rating: 4/5

I was sent a signed copy of this book for free as part of a bookish subscription box that reached out to me, but I don’t think that will influence my review. Still, I guess that’s a disclaimer for you.

The theme of the box that I received was all about the commute and this was pretty much the perfect book for it because it was mostly set on the commuter boats that people take to get into the city. As for the genre, it’s basically as close to generic contemporary thriller as you can get, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We have a lot of the classics tropes here, from an unreliable narrator to tons of twists and turns, complex interpersonal relationships and of course that little technique of jumping backwards and forwards through time to advance what’s happening in the present by bringing up something that happened in the past and which changes the way we look at things.

Other than that, I don’t really want to say too much about the plot, purely because as with most of these, half of the point is being taken by surprise. And I will say that while there were one or two things that I called pretty early on, there were also a couple of twists here and there that I didn’t spot.

It probably also helped that I received quite a nice edition of this, a hardback with the author’s signature in it, and so it was quite an aesthetically pleasing read, too. I can’t say that I’m the biggest fan of thrillers in general, as I tend to prefer either cosy mysteries, private detectives or gritty police procedural novels, but it certainly did the job and was a pleasant enough read, keeping me going until the end to find out the truth about what happened.

And that brings us on to the question of whether I’d recommend it or not, and that really depends upon the type of reader that you are. If you’re really into modern thrillers and you loved Gone Girl and Girl on the Train, you’re probably going to like this one. There are a ton of twists, more than I’ve seen in a novel of this size in quite a long time, and the characters are just warped enough to keep them interesting.

Learn more about The Other Passenger.


E. Lockhart – We Were Liars | Review

Title: We Were Liars

Author: E. Lockhart

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 228

Rating 2/5

 

 

I didn’t like this one, but that might be my own fault. I was expecting a sort of YA thriller in the vein of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, which I didn’t particularly like, but it turns out to be more of a romance, at least for the first half of the book. And then there’s the ending, which is what made me downgrade this from a 3/5 to a 2/5.

I also didn’t particularly like the writing style, especially when sentences were dragged over several small paragraphs
a bit like
this. It’s infuriating and I kept noticing it and being vaguely annoyed by it. I didn’t like the fairy tale sections either, and it sort of felt as though they were included as an afterthought to try to bulk the book out.

With that said, I can also kind of see why it’s a popular book, it just wasn’t my cup of tea. The main thing that I liked about it was that it was short and so it was over quickly, although I also quite liked the nameCadence” for the protagonist. It also made me think of American Pie III though, and now I want to re-watch it. Oops.

 


 

Click here to buy We Were Liars.