the last good day of the year
Jessica Warman
Turtle is taken on New Years Eve, and her sister Sam watches a man take her and is able to describe him accurately for the police to pick him up, and charge him with murder. Years later, she moves back and other things begin to fall into place.
If this novel had been billed as an expose of what it looks like when a family is ripped apart by a disappearance, then maybe I could have gotten into it. Even then, it was too caught up in what Sam felt for anything else to really come through. I never want to be in that position.
The twists and turns that could have added up so that the reader could get their own idea of the story? Yeah, I didn’t see why they were relevant until the end, and then I wasn’t interested. I was just grateful it was over. The front cover is lovely and creepy and subtle, but the storytelling and plot simply didn’t live up to it.
There was nothing redeeming about the end of this novel. I struggled to keep reading, and the thriller it should have been was broken for me by the constant jumping around in time. I simply wasn’t invested enough in Sam’s story. It’s a novel, it’s perfectly ok to give me a concrete ending to make sure everything is good. Or bad. Whatever.
Whether you’re looking for a low-key thriller, such as The Leaving or babydoll, or prefer something a bit more gritty like Irene or PainKiller, this novel doesn’t need to come near the top of your list. 2 stars from me.
Bloomsbury | July 2016 | $12.99 | Paperback
This book was such a disappointment. All the exciting things promised in the blurb turned out to be completely predictable. The grand secret? Meh. I wasn’t that convinced that her dad had done anything wrong. It’s hard to cope with children, of any kind!
This should have been called The Slow News Sisters instead of Keep Me Posted. What’s wrong with using a catchy term, even if it is later used in the novel? Not to mention it would have been a heads up for the progress being glacial.
You’d think that since I was up until 1am finishing this book (and doing some other writing) than means I enjoyed it. Honestly, I’m not sure that I did. There were huge time gaps and gaps in Jinhau’s memory that made me fall out of the novel time and time again.
This was such a slow novel. I was halfway through and saying to my partner that I wasn’t sure I could face keeping on reading it. I started out being a bit wary of it, because of the changing perspectives.
I wasn’t won over by the way there were ‘bytes’ of information from the way that Scarlett and Lucas thought. I didn’t like the consciousnesses changing, and I thought Avery was an idiot. A rich, spoilt idiot.
I didn’t even realise Earl was black. Call me stupid, but I didn’t even look at the front cover before I started this novel. And then it doesn’t bother me that people would be a different race to me, so I guess I didn’t pick it up for ages.
Cliche, cliche, cliche. Fall for for the ‘bad boy’, get dumped, go back to the ‘safe choice’. Seriously girl, I’d be pretty worried you know what love is before you head off into the woods with someone.
I read at least five of the short stories (I had to say I had read half at least), and although the prose was fantastic, the characters believable, there was something about each storyline that left me grasping at anything that would give me meaning with them. I’d read each one, and feel sort of empty, not fulfilled.
It’s the 20th anniversary after the Vietnam War. Since this novel was published and made its way into my hands I have seen a bunch of novels on the same topic. I know better than to ask for them though. I’m not even sure I asked for this one.