The book was better?… cbr10bingo So I literally picked up this book from the library because I saw the trailer for the movie. It couldn’t have fit better into cbr10 bingo if I tried! I’m someone who likes to read the book before watching the movie or TV show, so there are probably a lot of these that could fit this category. Looking at some stills from the movie and reading a little about it (today after I’m done reading the book), it looks like […]
Hungry for Love, Ready to Drown
When I need a new book to read, I generally go to my library’s website and see what I have on my TBR list, and what from that list is available to check out. Sometimes I put a lot of thought into it, and other times I’ll just grab something that sounds okay. Such was the case with The Stranger Game, and it was just about exactly what I thought it might be–okay. When she was 11, Nico’s older sister Sarah, who was 15 at […]
A mysterious murder and excess alcohol consumption? Must be an unreliable female narrated thriller…
I’ve been on a bit of a thriller kick recently, so–like many other Cannonballers–I’ve read In a Dark Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. They relied very heavily on the ‘unreliable female narrator’ trope, bringing up inevitable comparisons to The Girl on the Train. They’re not as good as Girl on the Train. (I haven’t read Gone Girl, while I have seen the film, so I can’t compare there.) I’m way behind on my reviewing, but I figured I’d start with these ones. Quick […]
Like hope, stupid also floats.
Quite possibly the stupidest, most aggravating character in recent memory blunders her way through a mystery like an amateur Inspector Clouseau. It’s staggering how many poor decisions our hero Laura “Lo” Blacklock makes on a minute to minute basis. I had to keep checking that the author wasn’t actually a man writing under a woman’s pseudonym because this is one of the most misogynistic books I’ve read in some time. Sample dialogue: “I groaned at my own stupidity…” “Why didn’t I listen to…” “How could […]
Better than expected
Others have drawn comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and, being the natural conformist that I am, I’m not going to buck the trend. If you like your female mystery novel narrators on the unreliable side, this may be the book for you. Which is a weird burgeoning trope, if, indeed, three books can be considered a trope. Sometimes, a culture just decides that it’s ready for something. We all consume, basically, the same information. So its not surprising that there would be […]
Finally, an unreliable narrator who isn’t horrible
I’ve written fairly extensively about how much I dislike unreliable narrators, and how books written to damage the psyche are, I think, grotesque and antithetical to everything I want in a book. The narrator here is struggling through a fairly difficult time in her life, and therefore can’t always be relied on to objectively perceive her reality – but I think it’s handled in a way that is fair to the characters, and it’s done in service to the story, not as some cheap ploy […]