2 stars
| While I have not seen the Netflix adaptation of this yet, I think the big problem I had with this book was that going into it I had the vague notion that POSSIBLE SPOILER (you don’t really get any answers at the end and don’t find out what the creatures are or what is going on.) This is a huge pet peeve of mine, because I think it lacks creativity and I am just never satisfied when books/movies take this route. Because of this, the book was less satisfying and more irritating for me. The writing itself was fine, overall pretty simple with some good descriptions. I do need to stop reading the quotes on the covers of books though because they always let me down. Calling this “a notably strong study of modern psychological terror” set my expectations a bit high and the book just could not deliver. At no point was I scared, terrified, or left in suspense. I found most of the book to drag on and much of it was a bit predictable given the time switches. I also found that I didn’t really care about the three main characters in the present tense. Throughout the book, Malorie was such a plain, boring character without a personality that I could not even see her as an actual character. She seemed like a sketch rather than a person that I needed to root for. Likewise, the children don’t have personalities either, much less names, so they didn’t feel real to me. The only ones I cared about were Tom and Victor and you know something is going to happen to them right from the beginning so you don’t even have much time to get attached. Overall, I think this was an okay read. The premise was good, but on the whole it just fell flat for me. I found much of my reading experience to consist of a few annoying things that built up so that I couldn’t find much to enjoy about the book. The suspense was mostly just scenes dragging on way too long then not resulting in much or resulting in something the reader saw coming for a while. I do still want to watch the film adaptation to see how it compares, but the book just wasn’t that interesting to me. Goodreads |