Those People

I am going to be honest, when I read the synopsis on the back of the book I was intrigued. I was expecting something darker than it is, something that would keep me on the edge. While there is a fair amount of mystery, Those People doesn't really stand out to me. I enjoyed reading it, it's a nice suburban life novel, it is entertaining, but it's not exciting, it's not all that surprising.

I can't say I related to any of the characters, I didn't strongly like or dislike any of them (strongly being the key word here) and my thinking of Darren was conditioned by the characters. Seeing how all of the neighbours were against him and we only get to see their perspective and not Darren's too, it's easy to dislike him.

Despite all that, I rated the book at 4/5 because it's a good read. It's not boring, it didn't feel like a chore reading it and I definitely don't regret it. But it is just that, a suburban life story and if you are not particularly into the genre I don't suppose you'd get much from it.

This is a 2.9, on the other hand. It was all good, but one, she sort of repeated the formula for the ending being a surprise surprise. two, it got old fast, the whole community hating the neighbors so much so fast and them being so oblivious. there's an obvious element of prejudice, awfulness and generally horrible human beings in a mob mentality sort of way, but still, it was kind of fast and they were not even that knit close anyway. three, the way it ended was sort of weird, I mean, it was almost like seven different people wanted to kill the guy at the same time, it got like a joke.

A batch of interesting characters, deliciously dislikable, around a very twisty mystery.