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rebleejen's review against another edition
4.0
At first all I could think was how horrible these two people were. Then I started to feel sorry for them a little. Then I thought, "Yeah, but they're still horrible." Then things started getting a little nuts, but by then I was emotionally invested, so I didn't even mind.
booksavor's review against another edition
5.0
I came across this book by Holly Brown in one of my daily emails from BookBub and it seemed like the perfect $1.99 splurge for reading on a plane during a quick weekend trip. It was money well spent! This novel is well written, believable, and engrossing. I thoroughly enjoyed the entirety of it.
The novel opens with a pretty common situation: after some miscommunication, a somewhat disgruntled guest leaves a scathing review of a stay in an Airbnb-type vacation home. The owner offers a rebuttal, but neither party is happy with that end. The two women in question come to enjoy this oddly satisfying feeling of moral righteousness and superiority over each other; while they engross themselves in this virtual relationship, their actual lives begin to feel the effects of their distraction and temporary obsession, bringing secrets and lies to the surface.
Suspense novels and psychological thrillers, even the best-selling ones, are often hit or miss for me. I so often find that an initially promising premise quickly becomes completely ridiculous or far fetched. Holly Brown wowed me, to be blunt. To take something so ordinary (who HASN’T left a negative review) and spin it into something so intriguing takes some skill. Her characters were all so well rounded that I wasn’t sure whether to love them or hate them...even though I’m finished with the novel, I still don’t know and I’m happy to feel that ambiguity. It’s the mark of a fleshed out and whole character. The ending also felt very satisfying with just the right amounts of closure and ambiguity.
This book is Gone Girl + Big Little Lies + We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I am intending as completely complementary!
The novel opens with a pretty common situation: after some miscommunication, a somewhat disgruntled guest leaves a scathing review of a stay in an Airbnb-type vacation home. The owner offers a rebuttal, but neither party is happy with that end. The two women in question come to enjoy this oddly satisfying feeling of moral righteousness and superiority over each other; while they engross themselves in this virtual relationship, their actual lives begin to feel the effects of their distraction and temporary obsession, bringing secrets and lies to the surface.
Suspense novels and psychological thrillers, even the best-selling ones, are often hit or miss for me. I so often find that an initially promising premise quickly becomes completely ridiculous or far fetched. Holly Brown wowed me, to be blunt. To take something so ordinary (who HASN’T left a negative review) and spin it into something so intriguing takes some skill. Her characters were all so well rounded that I wasn’t sure whether to love them or hate them...even though I’m finished with the novel, I still don’t know and I’m happy to feel that ambiguity. It’s the mark of a fleshed out and whole character. The ending also felt very satisfying with just the right amounts of closure and ambiguity.
This book is Gone Girl + Big Little Lies + We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I am intending as completely complementary!
veereading's review against another edition
1.0
I'm going to be honest here, I really didn't like this novel. I will admit, I wasn't expecting any kind of crazy thriller. But this was just a little more preposterous than I could handle. The story is told from alternating points of view and each woman gets her chance to tell her side. I didn't like either woman. They've got so many issues and they really just never think things through. Their self-centered attitudes and belief in their own righteousness drove me crazy. By the first 70 pages, I could see myself getting bored as the story started to pull away from this dispute and start to focus on other areas of their separate lives. And again, I didn't really care about what else they were going through, or what their past was like. Both of these women were married but I couldn't take either of their marriages seriously. Dawn's marriage seemed very juvenile and lacked any substance. Miranda's marriage was like something out of the 1950's, where the husband is always right and it is the wife's job to look pretty and cook nice dinners. This really bothered me because I like females to have a stronger role than that in the novels I read. I had figured out the ending by the halfway point; it was not as thrilling as one might expect. At the end, I was just wondering why this novel was even a good idea. It really didn't have that much to do with the renting idea that it started with and it just got more and more ridiculous the further you read it. Also, the ending, while technically making sense, didn't actually work. Overall, this novel failed for me because it's story lacked the thrills I was seeking and the characters were very unlikable. For those reasons, I'm giving this a 1/5 stars.
hollowspine's review against another edition
3.0
3.5
I wasn't sure where I stood on this book, especially with it's slow build up, but in the end I enjoyed the pieces of the puzzle fitting together near the end of the novel. I may not have loved either character, who were two realistically portrayed women, both flawed and shaped by a society that generally isn't kind to women, especially those who don't have wealthy backgrounds or who are old.
There were some places in this book that were a little hard to read, especially when it came to the older woman's relationship with her son, who is an addict. One aspect of their extremely fraught relationship is revealed which shakes the women's entire world view and it made me feel extremely sad about humanity in general, because as much as this is fictional, people can be so depressingly vile and predictably cruel.
It's also a book that despite speaking to human conditions that have always been around, lying, abuse, deception, justification of behaviors, addiction - it also speaks to something evolving with our use of technology. We can hurt each other remotely through social media, we can track and watch and think we know each other without ever having a conversation, we make assumptions based on our perception of an emoji or random punctuation.
I'm glad I read to the end, because despite the fact that although I could sympathize with both characters I didn't like either of them much and it took a long time for me to feel an investment in their stories.
I wasn't sure where I stood on this book, especially with it's slow build up, but in the end I enjoyed the pieces of the puzzle fitting together near the end of the novel. I may not have loved either character, who were two realistically portrayed women, both flawed and shaped by a society that generally isn't kind to women, especially those who don't have wealthy backgrounds or who are old.
There were some places in this book that were a little hard to read, especially when it came to the older woman's relationship with her son, who is an addict. One aspect of their extremely fraught relationship is revealed which shakes the women's entire world view and it made me feel extremely sad about humanity in general, because as much as this is fictional, people can be so depressingly vile and predictably cruel.
It's also a book that despite speaking to human conditions that have always been around, lying, abuse, deception, justification of behaviors, addiction - it also speaks to something evolving with our use of technology. We can hurt each other remotely through social media, we can track and watch and think we know each other without ever having a conversation, we make assumptions based on our perception of an emoji or random punctuation.
I'm glad I read to the end, because despite the fact that although I could sympathize with both characters I didn't like either of them much and it took a long time for me to feel an investment in their stories.
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