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Book Review – The Woman in Cabin 10
This is going to be short because I didn’t like this book from the very beginning. I could tell from the way paragraphs would read like so,
What?
Oh God.
How?
See. That’s annoying. It tells you nothing while acting like it’s intense. It’s not intense. It’s stupid. So is this,
What? What?
How was that? She said something and then repeated that something with emphasis. How would it be if you were reading a book that started every other paragraph like that? Cause I can attest that it’s the worst.
Let’s just get to what the book is about. A woman, we’ll call her Lo because obviously that’s short for Laura, is on a cruise ship and she hears a body fall into the water. Now, I know what you’re thinking, how did she hear a body fall in the water if she was in her cabin on a moving cruise ship in the middle of the ocean. Simply, she just heard it. She knew, instantly, it was not the sound of waves, or dolphins or a bag of oranges. It was a body.
I don’t know how forgiving you can be but for me, I couldn’t get past the inciting incident. It reads incredibly childish and ruins the whole book for me. Because no one else believes Lo that she heard a body and all I could think was, “Well, yeah, no duh.” Why should they? Who would? And when Lo is mad at everyone for not believing her, she comes across annoying and fairly stupid. Oblivious, even. And she references Wikipedia ALL THE TIME. It’s her only investigation ability. Lo is not a likable character and since the whole book is told in her point of view, the relationship between story and reader is strained from the very beginning.
It’s a long book for how little actual mystery is present. It drags too long for a thriller. It takes a quarter of the book before Lo is even on the the boat, let alone for the obvious body-hitting-ocean sound to take place. The reveal isn’t interesting, the climax is underwhelming and I just wanted to close the book for good. There’s chapters that take place back on dry land that might hint at the outcome, but they’re underwhelming and fail to add any momentum.
I’ve said before I don’t love mysteries, but this is just bad literature. I know this was selling like crazy, it was on the New York Times Best Sellers list forever but it doesn’t matter. All those people got duped. This was not a dark and mature story akin to Gone Girl nor is it as intense of a mystery as Girl on a Train. I will not be trying another book that claims to be “in the style of” those titles again. I’m done. I’m out.
All the Books Show: Episode 88 – Stuck in a Book Rut
This happens to the best of us. We love to read and then that love turns on us. Turns us into something we never wanted to be. A person who doesn’t like reading.
That’s how I live my life. Dramatically.
We also have a fan song. Because we’ve been going on for a long time and our fans are restless with their love. You can find that song at minute 16:16 and play it over and over.
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See you next week, podcats!