Book 30!

Today I'm grumpy because writing spoiler free book reviews can be very frustrating!  I will try my best to avoid spoilers, but if I do include any they will be clearly labelled or hidden or what have you.  To be totally honest spoilers don't usually bother me and I don't really go out of my way to avoid them.  But!  For instances where the spoilers would ruin a big twist, or where knowing something beforehand takes all the fun out of the experience (for a mystery, thriller, et cetera), I hate spoilers!  So this book, book 30, is one of those instances because the final twist surprised me - which almost never happens - and I really think that the book would be ruined (or if not ruined pretty disappointing) if you knew what happened in advance.

So!  Here is the 30th book I read this year: The Last Time I Lied by Riley Sager. 

Pretty cool cover, right?

Here's the summary (taken from amazon):

Two Truths and a Lie. The girls played it all the time in their cabin at Camp Nightingale. Vivian, Natalie, Allison, and first-time camper Emma Davis, the youngest of the group. But the games ended the night Emma sleepily watched the others sneak out of the cabin into the darkness. The last she--or anyone--saw of them was Vivian closing the cabin door behind her, hushing Emma with a finger pressed to her lips.

Now a rising star in the New York art scene, Emma turns her past into paintings--massive canvases filled with dark leaves and gnarled branches that cover ghostly shapes in white dresses. When the paintings catch the attention of Francesca Harris-White, the wealthy owner of Camp Nightingale, she implores Emma to return to the newly reopened camp as a painting instructor. Seeing an opportunity to find out what really happened to her friends all those years ago, Emma agrees.

Familiar faces, unchanged cabins, and the same dark lake haunt Nightingale, even though the camp is opening its doors for the first time since the disappearances. Emma is even assigned to the same cabin she slept in as a teenager, but soon discovers a security camera--the only one on the property--pointed directly at its door. Then cryptic clues that Vivian left behind about the camp's twisted origins begin surfacing. As she digs deeper, Emma finds herself sorting through lies from the past while facing mysterious threats in the present. And the closer she gets to the truth about Camp Nightingale and what really happened to those girls, the more she realizes that closure could come at a deadly price.

So that sounds super interesting, right?  I had read Sager's previous novel Final Girls earlier this year (not that long ago at all, actually) and enjoyed it a lot.  It was also not quite what I expected, and an interesting take on thrillers and the idea of the "final girl" - a single survivor from a horrific event or killing spree.  There was an excerpt of this book in Final Girls so of course I read it, and I was immediately hooked.  Like the summary talks about, the protagonist Emma only paints one thing: forest scenes covering the shapes of three girls that disappeared fifteen years prior when she went to summer camp.  This was such an interesting, evocative image that my attention was caught immediately and I definitely wanted to read more and find out the circumstances of the disappearances and how Emma fit into the story.

But unfortunately...  I don't feel like the book lived up to that initial hook!  The rest of it was just... too prosaic in comparison.  And while I don't have a problem with sparse prose, or a lack of poetry in novels (especially thrillers, where you don't really want to romanticize the bad things happening anyway), I went in with expectations because of that beginning that just weren't met.  I did a booktube video review, which you can watch here:

So!  To expand on my thoughts there (or if you didn't feel like watching the video), here are a few pros:

• as I mentioned, a great hook
• a strong, surprising ending
• engaging writing that kept me interested in the story

I think my favorite part of the book was the fact that the ending surprised me.  As I mentioned in my video overview/review, the story seemingly ends, but then the big, final twist comes.  And it makes sense in the context of the story, it's definitely not just completely out of nowhere, but I wasn't expecting it.  It wasn't perfect. I think some readers may find it a bit clunky just because it sort of comes right at the end with little lead up and very little explanation, but it does at least answer some questions.  And like I said, I liked that it was a surprise - by virtue of being right at the end, after you think things are resolved, it definitely leaves an impression.  

But now some cons:

• the characters were not fleshed out and felt like props or tools instead of people - I found this frustrating throughout, but there are two specific instances where this was a detriment to the story itself
• as a narrator, Emma was very frustrating because of all the information she withheld for what felt like no reason other than to trick the reader
• the pacing is slow - though the writing is engaging, things take a long time to get started and there's a disproportionate amount of time spent on the beginning/set-up compared to the actual plot elements and the big mystery of the book
• likely in service to the big reveal, there were plot elements that felt under-explored, or too quickly resolved (the resolution of one thread in particular was too quick and too neat and for me, really didn't work, almost pulling me out of the story)
• there is an unbelievable scene where Emma starts menstruating at camp and doesn't seem to understand exactly what was happening - which I'm sure is the case for some girls, but  I was really side-eyeing the whole time I was reading it.  The scene served a purpose of getting her and Vivian - one of the girls who disappeared - to bond, and I think there could have been another more believable situation that would have served the same purpose
• there was a - very small admittedly - romance subplot that I felt didn't quite fit well in the story (For spoiler reasons, I can't really be specific about any of this, though.)
• because of the ending, there are a few threads dangling that on retrospect don't make a lot of sense - this could be explained on a subsequent reading, and it's very possible that I'm just not remembering well enough

I talked about the characters in my video review, but it does bear repeating that they were all pretty flat.  The camp proprietor, Franny, had a sort of affected "rich person" way of talking that I didn't quite believe.  There are several characters who are just there, and it probably would have worked just as well without them.  The other two girls who disappeared along with Vivian are given almost no personality.  Emma made a few comments about them or what they're like, and as I read I thought "Uh, really?  Are we supposed to know that?  I don't remember that, and haven't seen that at all."  The observations were framed in a way that seemed like the reader was supposed to already know that about them, but I didn't remember it at all.  I might have missed it, but that just brings up a similar problem of them being so unmemorable.  From the beginning - that evocative hook I mentioned - I thought they'd be important, or have a personality at all, but...  No.  Not really.

Something else that might be worth mentioning is that though it takes place at a summer camp, it's not really the sort of 80s summer camp horror that image might conjure.  There are a few trappings, but it's not really that sort of story.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but there were several problems that kept it from being great.