CBR Bingo: Shelfie (Purchased the e-book–it’s cheap!)
Yay! I can’t believe I finished my Bingo card, this is my first time ever doing that! I wish I would have finished on a stronger book, though.
Stranded is the story of Maddy, a woman who has been cast on a Survivor-esque reality show where eight people are left on an island for a year to try and survive and build a community. After a couple months of uneasy cooperation, things start to go wrong. If you’ve read Lord of the Flies, you can imagine what starts to happen here–the difference being that everyone on this island is a grownup. Maddy soon finds herself at odds with the leader of the group, Duncan, and chaos and Very Bad Things ensue. The story on the island is intercut with scenes from Maddy’s interview with the reality show’s producers before she goes to the island, and her interview with a newscaster after she’s returned.
The good: There’s a lot of tension, and even though it was pretty clear from the start that the outcome of the year on the island was going to be disastrous, I was still surprised by most of the twists. If you like stories about all the ways that civilization can collapse without outside law and order, you might like this. I also liked the stuff about how the group survived–like what they ate and foraged and all that.
The bad: Every single person in this book is completely unlikable, right now down to the producers and cameramen who only appear in one or two scenes. These people are aggressively awful. Even Maddy, the protagonist, is not someone I’d want to spend any time with in the real world. She’s one of those characters who only appears in books of this type, a woman with no friends (why don’t women in contemporary mysteries and thrillers ever have any friends?) and not much personality beyond rubbing everyone she meets the wrong way. There are plot holes too–and normally plot holes in a thriller don’t bother me so much if the book is exciting, but these ones are just stupid. People don’t react like normal adults, they react in a way that helps the plot advance. The book drags in the back half and is too long, I found myself skimming large parts of it.
This book has a lot of positive reviews on Goodreads, so this is probably a case of a mismatch between reader and book. I just don’t understand this entire genre of thrillers where every character is an awful person–it makes these books so unpleasant to read.