Emma Cline is very good at making you uncomfortable and creating tension through a string of otherwise mundane events. That being said, this book annoyed me. While drifting, the character Alex comes into contact with a lot of other characters and sometimes it felt like these character interactions were added into the story just to fatten up the page count rather than teach us anything new about Alex as a person. You’d think a character driven, vibes-only plot would let you in on the mind of the character but there’s a distance between the reader and Alex that is never truly crossed, which made it hard to really care about anything that happened to her. The Alex we meet on page one, is the Alex we see at the very end… she hasn’t gotten better, and she hasn’t gotten worse, and that’s the big crime here, isn’t it? Her stagnancy.

And… that ending. I normally enjoy ambiguous, open endings but this bothered me… a lot. This book was like watching a very, very slow train crash that slows down to a complete stop before it even hits anything.