Great idea as usual from Claire North. The writing was a little too Chuck Palahniuk-ish for me but still good ( )

Terrific. Even better than The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, something I hadn't imagined possible. What a great writer! ( )

This is not a fantastic fiction, but fantastically boring. I was constantly hoping for a better continuation and it was never realized. ( )

not sure how to categorise this story. enjoyed the plotting and characters, especially with the constantly-changing alliances, the good guy becomes bad, and vice-versa... wasn't a huge fan of the writing style, where a fair amount of the internal first-person dialogue was free-form. using it once, maybe twice, ok. using it all over the place, obnoxious...

the "rules" for the main character seemed consistent throughout, had me wondering what i would have done in similar circumstances... ( )

4,1 stars

It took me a month to read this book, which sums up why this wasn't a five star read for me.

I enjoyed the plot and I think the themes in this book were fascinating while quite creepy in their plausibility. (I have serious misgivings of having ever installed Facebook Messenger on my phone, for one thing.) The characters seemed real enough and Hope's condition was described convincingly. I did have a hard time relating to (or even empathizing with) Hope, though, which might have been intentional on the author's part. Or maybe not.

The one thing that I had most issues with, is also one of the good things about this book, and that was the writing style. Hope has lived her formative and adult years without any emotional connection to anyone, and in order to keep herself sane, she has constructed her consciousness to be made up of lists, and mantras, and trivia. And this was portrayed heavily in the way the story was told. While I understood what North was trying to convey with the writing (and she did succeed as well, to an extent), the stylistic decisions were so dominant that for me, they kept pulling me from the story, making this a very, truly, incredibly slow read. Even more so because the plot was quite interesting, so it's a feat in itself to make this lack any sort of pull.

I think I would have enjoyed this more had the book been around a 150 pages shorter.

However, this was a good book in the end, just maybe not something I was in the mood for right now. (And it definitely did not measure up to Harry August, which I should never have measured this against to begin with.) ( )