Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
FYI, this book has a very long trigger warning, and I suggest that you read it and decide if you want to read this book or skip it.
Initial thoughts: Not a lot to say except this book dragged on forever. I don’t know where the author was going with things and I just gave up after a while. There’s some interesting ideas here and there, but the full execution was too much. The book is stuffed with ghosts, reincarnation, murder, etc. and this is supposed to be a homage of sorts to Carrie which I still don’t get.
“Mary” follows almost 50 year old Mary who is called home by her aunt from New York. It’s a good time for Mary to leave New York since she just got fired, and found out her rent is going to be so high she won’t be able to afford it. But her returning to the small desert town of Arroyo feels Mary with dread. Mary doesn’t have a lot of memories after her parents died in a fire, but she knows she was bullied and unhappy. Packing her “Loved Ones” (I hope you like seeing those words) which are porcelain dolls with her, Mary returns to her Aunt Nadine. But being back home brings something ugly and angry back to life in Mary, and she slowly starts to try to investigate the town’s history and her connection to a serial killer who was shot dead by the police almost 50 years ago.
So here’s the thing, this is gory, but that didn’t put me off. What put me off was how boring and fragmented this entire book was. It goes on forever and at times I just gave up trying to work out what was happening to whom and why. I think there was some interesting parts of it (the linkage between Greek mythology and all of that) but it gets buried in this book. Mary is honestly not an interesting character, and I think we were supposed to root for her, similar to Carrie, but the whole book had me going what is going on now. I don’t know. I just wish more parts had been explained. Instead there felt like there was a lot of hand waving and plot holes here and there.
I did like that Mary who is going through peri-menopausal incidents right now is dealing with trying to tamper he rage down. So kind of a reverse Carrie. For people who read that book, we all know that Carrie came into her own after she got her period. But that really was the only similarities I saw. Especially since we had a ton of reveals that showed us who Mary really was as a kid before she got “sent away.” Another reviewer mentioned being in Mary’s mind for over 400 pages was a lot, and honestly it was. I think it would have been better to break up the book a bit to just give us another POV besides the sheriff at the very beginning of the book.
The ending was a letdown. There’s a twist (that I saw coming) and then we just have more of the same apparently.