***100 Days of Summer Reading 2023***
Reading Prompt: Book that has a house with yellow windows on the cover
Vlirtual 12 sided dice roll: 9
This is a thriller and I have an uneasy relationship with this genre. I think that choosing an audiobook rather than a printed one made this a good experience for me. If I'd been reading print, I suspect I would have stalled out, but having someone read it to me kept me engaged. Having said that, the narrator spoke v e r y s l o w l y. Drove me crazy until I increased the speed to get her up to normal human speed.
I will be seeing the author in a few days at a conference and I now have an idea what her writing is like. I liked that the main character was a librarian, having spent my working life in libraries myself. I also felt that her obsessive research of the old crime that had overshadowed her family was exactly what I would have done in the same situation. I enjoyed the two timelines, the present and 14 years earlier, alternating chapters. Baart placed the clues carefully, dealing them out gradually, allowing the reader a fair chance of pinpointing the actual murderer (but she fooled me anyway).
The main character, Juniper Baker, frustrated me from time to time with her cluelessness about other people. It can kind of be forgiven in a nineteen year old, but is less understandable in a librarian in her early thirties. I found by book's end that I had judged her a bit harshly, as her whole family was actively keeping secrets from her, making her feel like an outsider. I did enjoy the different role that the police officer, Everett Stokes, played in the plot. Presented as single, attractive, and also invested in solving the case, Baart could have taken the cliché route of making him a romantic possibility for June. Instead, she had a much more interesting role for him to play. I also appreciated that Baart didn't neatly tie up all the threads of June's life at the end. That's not how life works, so I liked that there were still relationships to be ironed out.
So, if you enjoy the thriller genre, this might be enjoyable for you. I think I'm done with this author, now that I've acquainted myself with her, but that's due to my own preferences, not a lack of skill.
No comments:
Post a Comment