Nine Perfect Strangers
Ratings196
Average rating3.5
With its low ratings and some scathing reviews I expected to find this painful. Instead I found myself laughing out loud, wiping tears away and feeling engaged and interested in the lives of nine perfect strangers. Moriarty brings the characters to life and the story was light, but held enough gravity to be poignant at times.
This was a weird one... different than her others, but I still really enjoyed it! Character development was on point and the sense of place was well established. Definitely one of my current favourite writers
This book kept me very, very interested. I am SO excited to see Nicole Kidman as a starring role in this TV show that will be hopefully coming out next year. I think the pacing was good, and the story-telling was very well done especially with how many POVs there were + the back stories and changing timelines.
However, the payoff at the end was just not worth it for me. I certainly enjoyed the journey, but I guess I was disappointed in the destination.
The motivation for Mascha to be "crazy" seemed to truly be lacking and the backstory there was just simply not enough. Felt like she was crazy just to be crazy and I'm really over the "twist" in many novels being an insane woman. Also it really really rubs me the wrong way when they explain the turbulent country conditions in an Eastern European country and think THAT BY ITSELF is enough evidence to prove why the character is a villain/crazy.
The characters were so well-rounded out - I feel like I know each and every one of them.
I enjoyed Nine Perfect Strangers! The author has a great way of painting characters well. What I liked most was that at most times, I had no idea where the story was going. There were some funky twists and turns, and I could see how those might not be someone's taste, but I had a good time trying to figure out what would happen next.
This book was trash. Liane Moriarty is trash. The next Paula Hawkins..... TRASH. These authors start with such potential in their storylines and character execution and then just throw all that out the window. Liane moriarty's author style is the equivalent to writing a vocabularily rich sentence then getting THE WORST hand cramp on the last few words leaving the structure integrity of the sentence compromised. Good grief.
Liane Moriarty's star has been in ascendance over the past few years with her hugely popular book Big Little Lies being turned into an HBO TV show with a powerful female cast of Hollywood big hitters and readers lauding her books both old and new. When I spotted a beautiful hardback copy of her newest release Nine Perfect Strangers in a local charity shop I knew I couldn't resist a chance to delve into her writing once again.
Nine Perfect Strangers started out really well, we follow a group of, as the title says, nine strangers who all check into a health retreat that promises to change their lives forever. We have author and recent catfish victim Frances as our main protagonist as she checks into Tranquillum House in order to deal with her own self-doubt over her writing abilities, her recent heartbreak, and a bad back. The book is told mostly through the eyes of Frances as she meets the other guests and staff of Tranquillum House, most notably it's the strange and enigmatic owner who seems to have all the answers to her guest's troubles even if her approach seems somewhat questionable.
As we delve into Frances' life and troubles and learn about her and her fellow guests I was really enjoying this book. It had a delicious people watching vibe to it. I felt I was getting a glimpse into different worlds of the guests and wondering just how it was all going to be connected because as readers of Moriarty's novels will know there is often a twist. I liked the people I was reading about, as we learned more about them they were all redeemable and in the main likable and I wanted the book to continue uncovering the layers of their stories until they began to either heal or in a twisty way, merge.
Then around just over halfway through that thing happened where the twist came. Yes, Moriarty was doing it again and giving us something we hadn't expected. The only problem this time was it was just bizarre. It went from being quite a credible book to one that left me really quite amused that I was meant to take this seriously. It felt like a disjoint in the book and I'd suddenly slipped into a different book altogether where an almost Dr. Evil type character ala Austin Powers had crept in where everything was ‘groovy baby'.
The only thing that really kept this book on track after this point was the great job Moriarty had done prior to the twist in establishing her characters stories and their personalities and the fact we knew they were all redeemable people. This meant we could put aside what had happened and still root for them. Right through until the end when we follow them past Tranquillum House we want them to achieve the happiness they all sought at the start of the book and this keeps you reading and does provide a somewhat satisfying end to the story.
I know this book has received some very mixed reviews and so I was perhaps not totally shocked by the odd twist this one provided but when held up alongside Moriarty's other work this one did fall a little short if only because the shock factor was just a step too far to be believed.
I could have skipped this one and been okay with it.
Liane Moriarty can write books you can hardly put down, like The Husband's Secret and Big Little Lies, but not all her books are as good as that and unfortunately this is one of the not-so-good ones. While it's still very readable, the story is silly and unsatisfying. It has an enormous build up with not a lot of payoff.
The story is about nine people (who incidentally are not perfect strangers - two pairs are married couples and one is someone's child) who go to stay at an upmarket health & wellness retreat for a 10 day transformational cleanse. Over the first half of the book we gradually get to know them all and the emotional baggage that they have brought with them: failing relationships, failing careers, bereavement, personal dilemmas. It's all quite enjoyable to read, but it moves slowly. There's a lot about their daily routine - walks, clean food, spa treatments - and I had no sense of where the book was going or what the point of it was.
At about the halfway mark, that all falls into place as we finally understand the unusual intentions and methods employed by the spa's director. The second half is faster paced and we get to know all the participants very well - it's one of those books where everyone gets an epiphany - but what happens feels way too silly and I didn't find anything from this point on terribly interesting. I wanted to love it I really did and while it is a great concept, I could have skipped it and I would have been fine.
Ok, so this is a tad troublesome: on one hand, she's great at creating and developing characters and at giving twists to the stories. On the other hand, this one seemed to fall short because it was a bit too far fetched: their reactions, their behavior- ten little indians meets Misery.
Like all of Liane's books, this is a page-turner.
I loved the unusual premise, like nothing I've read before.
Unique and thoroughly readable.
Why did I pick it up?
I picked up this book because I wanted a light and easy read. Boy, I was wrong. lol
Describe the book in 5 words
Page-Turning, Intriguing, Surprising, Gripping and Creepy
Who would LOVE Nine Perfect Stranger I think this book would appeal to most.Thoughts This novel totally surprised me. Here, I thought I was picking up a light read, not so. Nine strangers attend a health resort, what could possibly go wrong? Everything! Thats what! Topics discussed were very current and relatable. I enjoyed this novel.
Absolutely wonderful book! Some say it's too slow, but I loved the insights into characters' past and into their minds and thinking patterns! It was fascinating to notice that some of them had minds working in similar fashion to mine.
The ending is a bit cheesy and quite predictable, but for me this book is not about the ending, it's more about the process. I found the book impossible to put down. I loved how all the little details were exactly right: the Russian words, the Soviet past, the fitness stuff.
Compelling, funny, poignant, even occasionally meta, but at the end I wasn't sure if there was a point to the story. In fact, at several point the plot became so bizarre it felt like Moriarty had lost control of what is going on. With a romance novelist as (at least nominally) the main character, there are lots of opportunities to take digs at the state of contemporary publishing and reviewing, but ironically I felt like the one romance subplot was shoehorned into the flow of the book, and didn't really fit well. The narration alternates between the nine spa guests (and several key spa staff), so none of the characters are explored deeply, but although I missed Moriarty's more intimate novels such as [b:What Alice Forgot 6469165 What Alice Forgot Liane Moriarty https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1377159022s/6469165.jpg 6659752], she is skilled enough that we understand quite a bit about each individual by the end. I barely put the book down in the 24 hours it took me to read it, and I'm still thinking about it 24 hours after I finished. That's a good book to me, despite my caveats.
DNF
Having loved many of LM's previous books, I was disappointed by this one. It was depressingly slow and the characters had few redeeming qualities.