It’s not bad, but it felt unfinished?

 

Energy: Visceral. Conciliatory. Woeful. 

Scene: 🇺🇸 Mount Pleasant, Virginia.

Perspective: We follow an artist with a spouse and 13 yr old daughter in dual timelines (1980s-1990s to current day). Their mother lived in their guesthouse and has recently passed, and they are grappling with grief along with personal stressors. We also get a side story of a character at a hotel. 

 

🐺 Growls: Too many dream/vision sequences. Unnecessary shock-value dog stuff. Awkward villain monologue in the middle of high-stakes ending. 

🐕 Howls: Referring to incidents withheld from the reader for far too long. Insufferable characters over-musing. Feeling like we never get to know Annie. 

🐩 Tail Wags: The overall idea of the story. 

 

🤔 Random Thoughts:

An “inferring” style read. There’s vagueness and we can infer to create suspense, but it relies so much on that approach that I felt disconnected from the story.  

 

Everyone is insufferable. The only character I was rooting for was the dog (don’t recommend). 

 

Annia being annoying isn’t a hit against the book, because I think there was meaning for why. She’d obsess over non-important tiny details, then her mind wandered at a key point, and she’d miss the obvious. Given her condition, I think that was the point – she isn’t always rational or justified in her approach to crises. But she felt so one-dimensional. 

 

This relied way too much on dream sequences to create spooks and suspense. 

 

I prefer third person, but wish this wasn’t. It felt like it was originally first person, then someone went back and changed it. The narrator was like an annoying middleperson between the story and the character. It was lagging on page. 

 

It’s almost Chapter 25 before ‘something happens’. 

 

The ‘big bad’ describes everything In The Middle of A High Stakes Scene…Why?! And in this case they are screaming the evil plan into the air!

 

This entire plot felt like it was dipping a toe in multiple genres on a shallow level. Like the same tale told as a contemporary fiction, then literary horror, then popcorn thriller, then magical realism suspense. It felt disjointed, never really went deep (if there was depth or meaningful symbolism, I missed it), but was written like it was trying to be deep. It’s not a bad story, it’s just told in a way that felt like the same story through the same lens with slightly different filters on. 

 

----

🤓 Reader Role: Middleman narrator. Interpreting first and conveying second, so it’s like they’re inserting meaning in the story without context. 

🗺️ World-Building: Vapid. Both for the actual settings/atmosphere and for being in the main character’s mind.   

🔥 Fuel: What do Annie’s dreams/flashbacks mean? What will happen with her marriage and relationship with her daughter? Driven by withholding, revelatory backstories, and dream sequences of cathartic release and philosophical insights. 

📖 Cred: Plausible-ish suspended disbelief-ish

 

Mood Reading Match-Up:

 

Content Heads-Up: Loss of parent (in adulthood). Verbal abuse (from child). Controlling parent. Generational trauma. War (refugee; PTSD; brief mention/recall). Car accident. Alcoholism. Dementia. Racism (bullying, verbal abuse, tokenism, stereotypical assumptions by characters). Intrusive thoughts, losing track of time, rituals, contamination anxiety. Mysophobia. OCD. Loss of pet (dog, misadventure). Grief. Infidelity. Spiders. Toxic femininity/unhealthy gender roles. Hoarding. Alcohol use. Blackmail. Potential false accusation. Domestic abuse (attempted rape, physical assault). 

 

Rep: Vietnamese. African. American. Second-generation American. Heterosexual. Bisexual. Cisgender. 

 

📚 Format: Audible