Review: The Woman In The Window – A.J. Finn

I received this book in exchange for an honest review. 

SYNOPSIS: Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems. – via Goodreads 

Uhm… I don’t really have an awful lot to say about this book. Not really much at all. It is not a bad read, at all. It is predictable – I mean we have all seen this plot in some book or some movie somewhere – someone housebound who sees something they should not and all the shenanigans that follow that.

The Woman In The Window had some interesting parts to it and some concepts that I enjoyed, and Anna’s situation is a quite fascinating – agoraphobic in the extreme, but a therapist helping others in a similar situation, and an alcoholic struggling to pull her life together. I thought at times this was overdone and other times it was underutilised. I feel that the only character that had any real depth is Anna, though that could truly be by design.

Anyway, the book is slightly longer than it strictly needs to be, though it is a pretty fast read. It’s decent but not fantastic, though I do think Finn writes quite well. I don’t really want to say too much because the book has some twists and turns, whether you expect them or not. I will certainly check out future works.

Review: Veronica (2017)

SYNOPSIS: Madrid, 1991. A teen girl finds herself besieged by an evil supernatural force after she played Ouija with two classmates. – via IMDB

Ag pffffff. This movie. Why?! I got my hopes up, what with reading a lot of positive feedback and having it compared favourably to The Conjuring (even though that has no rewatch value, it’s really good the first time around). I was so ready for a horror that was going to be good, and I thought this might be it, being a Spanish horror and all.

Well. This is certainly not it. I don’t know, it pretty much irritated me from the off. I wasn’t a fan of the cast, the kids running all over the show the whole time annoyed me, the mother and her terrible parenting skills also only served to piss me off (for reals, it is not the teenage daughter’s job to keep the kids fed and clean and in school). It’s neglect, I don’t care what is said about it. Then there is our titular Veronica herself, and she was just so… dull.

Forgetting about the meh characters all round, I found that the story had no bite, and was pretty damn generic. Nothing fancy, nothing special, nothing we haven’t seen before, and certainly nothing that will stay with you after all is said and done. The best character was Sister Death, and she’s barely in it. The story could have been generic but solid. I suppose it is for others, but it did not work for me – it lacked tension and focus and the execution came across as sloppy.

Veronica is also long. Far longer than it necessarily needed to be. It almost put me to sleep at times what with the drag throughout it. Nothing made me go wow. Nothing. The score itself wasn’t too bad, I thought it a bit quirky but I liked it, so there is that.

Okay, I will stop now. I found Veronica to be a super disappointing, bland, lifeless experience. It was peppered with clichés and suffered from horrible pacing and too much screaming and a major lack of an engaging story. I didn’t find it to be atmospheric, either. It just was… there. Oh well. I would skip this, you won’t really be missing that a million other supernatural horrors haven’t done before.

Review: Pines – Blake Crouch

Wayward Pines #1

SYNOPISIS: Secret service agent Ethan Burke arrives in Wayward Pines, Idaho, with a clear mission: locate and recover two federal agents who went missing in the bucolic town one month earlier. But within minutes of his arrival, Ethan is involved in a violent accident. He comes to in a hospital, with no ID, no cell phone, and no briefcase. The medical staff seems friendly enough, but something feels…off. As the days pass, Ethan’s investigation into the disappearance of his colleagues turns up more questions than answers. Why can’t he get any phone calls through to his wife and son in the outside world? Why doesn’t anyone believe he is who he says he is? And what is the purpose of the electrified fences surrounding the town? Are they meant to keep the residents in? Or something else out? Each step closer to the truth takes Ethan further from the world he thought he knew, from the man he thought he was, until he must face a horrifying fact—he may never get out of Wayward Pines alive. – via Goodreads

I’ve always wondered about these books, and been interested in checking them out, and just never got to it until recently. Amazon had them on special, so figured I would get my hands on them and see. I have never read anything about them and I have not watched the show, but I see it cropping up all over the place, hence I thought it might just be time to look into it.

Reading this, the first thing that popped into my mind is that it read like a Koontz novel. The longer I read, the more it reminded me of Koontz’s The House of Thunder in specific.I have not read spoilers for this story (there are few things I abhor as much), but the twists and turns in this novel did not really keep me in suspense. Why? Because I felt it was really predictable, and nothing really shocked me.

So let’s start with this – the premise is interesting. It is. A special agent in an accident and suffering from amnesia in a creepy little Stepford style town? For sure. Soon after that though it becomes evident that our leading man is not a particularly likable character, and there is a lot of him running back and forth but nothing happening. That does not necessarily make for a boring read, and it helps in this regard that the writing is not particularly meaty – meaning you are really just going to run through this, there is nothing you are going to chew on and think over, to really get involved with. So it certainly scores in the way of a quick read with an interesting premise, even though the execution is a little weak and definitely leaves one wanting. The fragmented sentences littered throughout the book were a source of endless frustration for me though, seriously!

I feel that Pines is a messy book, but entertaining. There was enough mystery to keep me going, although I had pegged the majority of the outcomes and plot twists before they were delivered, and the reveals were no shocker, save one. I have also got to admit that the reasoning behind things as well as some of the logic is completely preposterous, something I struggled to buy into. I know it sounds like a lot of bitching, but the story flows fast and it does pull you in, even though a lot is left to be desired. All that being said, I will check out the next novel in this trilogy. The completist in me will have me read all three; for the sake of completion as well as the fact that I paid for them.