rpweber15's reviews
259 reviews

Though this story was centered around an insanely cool premise, it was executed terribly. This was literally a revolving door of uninteresting characters, including the main character, and there wasn't much to distinguish between the husbands who got names and the ones who didn't. I suppose that might be the point, but we didn't even have a good main character to fall back on. She was vapid and one-dimensional. Did she actually learn anything over the course of a couple hundred husbands? The side characters served absolutely no purpose in this book and were boring. This book was easily 100 pages too long because it was the same thing over and over and over again; they were essentially 200 slight variations of an NPC. The author spent the entire time telling, not showing, and that is usually a red flag as to the type of reading experience I'm going to have. As a married woman who has been out of the dating game a very long time, I feel like maybe I'm not the target audience for this book...but even if I was, I'm still not sure what the author was trying to accomplish. The main character went from kicking husbands to the curb nearly immediately for a lot of stupid reasons to

Spoiler

choosing/settling for a husband before she even meets him.

I just don't get it. I finished the book out of curiosity. Not sure if that was the right call or not...but had I DNFed, I would have had to choose carefully at which husband I would return the book to the library.

The gothic vibes are impeccable in this book. This sapphic tale of two women with histories of pretty awful abuse starts slow but ramps up considerably in Part 3. The author's writing is wonderfully descriptive; like I said, the vibes are perfect. Though the story takes place in the 50s in the Netherlands, the author wrote it to seem much older and spookier; it was almost out of this world because it was so isolating. I especially liked how the author wove transcripts between Roos, our protagonist, and Dr. Montague, a psychologist, throughout the story...it was a cool way to unveil the plot. However (and this is why this wasn't a 5-star read for me), I wish there had been more on the relationship between Roos and her spirit companion Ruth; likewise for the relationship between Agnes and her spirit companion Peter. Ruth played a pretty integral role in events throughout the book, but she seemed like more of a plot device. In some ways, I feel like she could be the protagonist of her own novel (or maybe this story told from her perspective). I wish some of the repetition as it related to the character traits of Roos and Agnes had been replaced with more on Ruth and Peter. This is a great novel where you are constantly wondering if the women in this book are battling severe mental health disorders or if the spirit companions are real...or, I suppose, both. It's definitely earned its place on lists of great gothic literature!

I hate reality television, especially The Bachelor type shows. Most of this book is that and while reading it was better than watching it, it was still nothing but loathsome people and stupid plot. Unfortunately, the interesting part of the story was rushed through at the end with very little detail, context, or explanation. This is the perfect example of don’t judge a book by its cover. The pages after the cover were a vapid mess rather than the smart, satirical commentary I was really hoping for.

Tedious and half-baked with horrible pacing and one-note characters. The vibes were pretty good throughout a good bit of the book, but as I got to the ending, I got more and more annoyed by everything. This could have been an amazing story that matched the gorgeous cover but alas, it didn’t even come close. I should have DNFed this. I now know better than to continue based on vibes alone.

Also, the footnotes were dumb and also half-baked. This author committed to absolutely nothing in this book.

The cover is mesmerizingly amazing. The vibes of this book were impeccably eerie and tense. The narrator was very unreliable.

But the ending ruined the whole experience for me. Ugh.

Angstier (and for a slightly older audience) than the graphic novels, this novella is a nice continuation of the story of Nick & Charlie.

A far better writer could have pulled off a Wizard of Oz retelling. This author missed the mark. I was disappointed in this…the writing is sloppy, there isn’t a whole lot of character development that makes sense, and I still don’t get the romance. I enjoyed this quick read enough to finish; it was entertaining enough, I suppose.