Hannah

I absolutely loved the concept of this book, it was so mysterious the whole way through. I usually guess what's going on but couldn't with this one, and thought the ending was such an interesting twist and made me question my thoughts and opinions on the subject matter. It took me a longer time to read than anticipated, which I found frustrating, but it was worth it!

Recieved in A Book and A Brew subscription box

The concept of this book really intrigued me and I was excited to start reading it. From the start I didn't like the main character at all (I actually didn't like any of the characters), but persevered because of books like Eleanor Oliphant, where I didn't like the characters at first but grew to love them.

The main character in this is just crass, inappropriate and completely unrelatable. The plot (if you can call it that) is not much better. It is completely bizarre and unbelievable. The demon part is not conceived in enough depth to be a significant part and if developed further could have been an interesting aspect to the book. As it is, the book seems half finished, with more questions than there are answers. It feels like a tangled mess of half complete ideas with awful characters.

I really liked the premise of this book and was interested to see where it went but I couldn't get past the 5 page (on Kobo) graphic description of diarrhoea and subsequent eating of it, then the 5 or so pages of graphic description of vomiting after she's eaten her own faeces. Wtf?!

In terms of plot, I found it hard to believe that 1 year of homelessness (after 30+ years of “normal” life) had changed the character so much that she was unable/unwilling to function normally and enjoy home comforts, like a bed, not sitting in your own soiled clothes etc.

The main character really irritated me, the lengthy descriptions of everything (5 pages describing a tube journey in all manner of similes and metaphors) were just unnecessary and there really should have been warnings about the horrendously graphically detailed descriptions of bodily functions somewhere in the blurb. I'm glad this was a library book and not one I had purchased.

I started this book disliking the characters, but as I continued to read they had some great character development. While there are lots of extreme portrayals of “modern” women, O'Porter covers a range of mental health issues in a refreshing way. I enjoyed the links between the characters and the references to social media.

I really liked the format of this book and found it to be a really interesting way of setting out the story, but definitely feel like it could have been used more to give more clues, although this wasn't really needed as it was easy to guess who it was within the first 20 pages. That being said, the ending garnered an extreme eye roll from me, even though I had suspected that person for most of the book. It was just a bit ridiculous. The way in which the characters are involved in the case also became ridiculous and just removed any plausibility of the story for me as it just went too far.

I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the book poring over the CVs and other documents and quickly realised this was a waste of my time. There were lots of things unresolved at the end which frustrated me.