My next classic read and wow is this really good. Chapter 1 100% hooked me in. I wanted to know everything. Now I’m at chapter 4 and things are beginning to slow a bit and my first love reaction is starting to wear off. I’m loving the dark academia vibe, didn’t know that was my thing, so love that for me. I’m sad that we’ve kinda moved away from the classes and we’re focusing more on the characters after class/during their break. Richard is a perplexing character, well they all are if I’m honest. I want to know all these mysteries that surround this suspicious group of “friends”. I don’t think they really are friends. I can’t wait to read more to learn more of this world and these characters! 

 

I’ve just finished the first book (this novel is split into 2 books) and I won’t lie, this is starting to lose my interest. I’m not as excited to read it as I was when I first started it. I’m going to keep going because the end of chapter 5 has started to pick my interest back up. I’m not really feeling the relationships between the characters. They’re forced together by a fateful accident that one of them is holding over their heads… so the only thing they can think of to get out of it is to kill that character? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand Bunny (even his name bothers me) but damn, this got extremely dark, really fast. Also the characters come off as snobbish, but I think that could be the way Richard’s character perceives them as he’s the one telling the story, but they’re starting to bore me. We’ll see what happens as I continue my way through this dark tale. 

 

Don’t get me wrong, this book is interesting, but it’s getting tediously long. We get it, Bunny is “missing” but I feel like we can only go in circles looking for him for so long before it just gets boring. This has been filled with so many words that I’m like can we just get to the action already. When is this group of “friends” going to start sweating and get close to being investigated. Right now we haven’t really seen any of that; instead we’ve got all this outside noise that I guess is supposed to lead us away from the truth of what happened to Bunny, but we kinda already know, even if it wasn’t told. Unless maybe we don’t? Hmm. I guess I’ll have to read on to find out. I have 2 very big chapters left so we’ll see what happens next. 

 

Now we’re kinda getting somewhere and I feel like this is back on some sort of track. Chapter 7 was all about the funeral, it was roughly 100 pages on wasted words; so much of that didn’t need to be explained or said. This author just likes to add words for the sake of adding them; it makes this book feel even more pretentious than the content within. Now in the final chapter, which I’m halfway through, I’m starting to see what I’ve been looking for. The aftermath of the death (murder?) and how all these (unlikable) characters are slowly starting to go against each other. I find them all so dumb in their actions and they’re all so absorbed in so much substance abuse that something is going to spark and I’m just waiting for it all to explode. Am I still liking this? That’s debatable, but I do know I want to push through to the end… hopefully next week I’ll have my final thoughts. 

 

To think, when I started this book I was so in love with it, I couldn’t get enough. Now that it’s over, I’m glad that it’s over. What started out as an interesting group of people who studied under this strange professor, turned into a murder with annoying characters. That plot did start out pretty interesting, but slowly spiralled downwards for me. The author spoke in circles, using more words than was necessary to make this an extremely long novel, with pretentious characters who were all full of themselves, I couldn’t wait to be done. Am I glad I read this? I guess, I see what the appeal would be, since by the end the characters did start to self destruct, as I thought they would, but I wasn’t surprised by how it all went down.  This dragged in a lot of places and could have been better if it was shorter and the characters were a little more likeable. I can add this to the list I’ve read, but I know I won’t be reading this again.