Reviews with content warning for Suicide - The Last House Guest

Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda

11 reviews

xabbeylongx's review against another edition

challenging dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

Spoilers Ahead:
I can't quite figure out this book. It took me so long to get into, and I'm glad I finally finished it.
A girl called Sadie Loman has passed, and it's ruled a TW suicide. However, Avery, Sadie's best friend, finds it hard to believe she was capable of doing that. Sadie had a sadistic obsession with death, and that, as long as a note and her diary, is left behind after, convincing everyone she drowned herself. However, what they don't know is that the letter and the diary belongs to Avery herself.
From then on, things just don't sit right. The police investigate things, and it all boils down to one party, with four suspects. Avery, Parker (Sadie's brother), Luciana and Connor are the suspects, and they all point the fingers at each other.
I feel like some context is needed for this situation. Sadie liked to think of Avery as a product of herself. Avery went through a rough stage, after getting over the death of her parents in a car accident, and Sadie brought her into her family. A lot of people didn't like nor trust her, but the Loman's accepted her. They gave her a space to live, a job, and they accepted her into the family, all for Sadie's benefit.
Now, with Sadie gone, they've let her go. There was money taken out of the bank, and they blamed her, although Sadie took the fall. With her now gone, she was sacked. She decided to do some digging of her own. Apparently, Sadie was spotted with Connor, Avery's ex. She begs him to take her where they went, and the end up on a boat, travelling to an island, where she finds a USB stick. After digging, she realises that Parker caused her parents' car accident, and the money was there to pay her grandmother to stay quiet. There was, unfortunately, another sum of money unaccounted for, and it turns out Ben Collins, the local police officer that had been following Avery, leading the blame onto her, found Parker after the accident, and was also paid to keep quiet. He killed Sadie, because she found out, and he was going to kill Avery too, until Parker comes in. Upon finding out Collins killed his sister, there is an altercation, but at least they can put Sadie's memory to rest.
Originally, I just couldn't get into it. It took me until over halfway through to really be interested in the plot, and I don't exactly know why, because the plot by itself is just fantastic. I think there was a lot of descriptions, a lot of vivid imagery, but sometimes it was too much, and it was overbearing. There was a lot going on at once, and yet, there wasn't too much to the plot at the start. It started off very slowly. However, the pacing of the ending is fantastic, even though I would have liked to have heard more about what happened to everyone after it happened. We touched on Parker briefly, but what about Connor? I kind of shipped him and Avery together, and I desperately want to know if they found their way back together. Also, I had a lot of unanswered questions, which I thought was a bit weird. Like why did Sadie go to Connor and not her? This whole thing could have been solved if she'd brought the evidence to someone sooner, surely?
So yeah, not a fabulous read, but the plot is definitely interesting, I just think it wasn't executed the way I had hoped it would be.

Content Warnings

kyrstin_p1989's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

Decent thriller. Sad. Frustrating. Highlights the ways money can get you anything.

Content Warnings

basil_plant's review

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

investigation seemed to drag on while the discovery/ending was too rushed

Content Warnings

tspice24's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.5

Content Warnings

bringmybooks's review

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challenging dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

And with that, our Megan Miranda season comes to a close ... (for now, anyways)

B̷R̷I̷N̷G̷ ✨ 𝗕𝗢𝗥𝗥𝗢𝗪 ✨ B̷Y̷P̷A̷S̷S̷

1. The Only Survivors (2023)
2. The Perfect Stranger (2017)
3. All the Missing Girls (2016)
4. The Last House Guest (2019)
5. The Last to Vanish (2022)
6. Such a Quiet Place (2021)

Well, there you have it. 6 Megan Miranda books in 6 days. OOF.

(Even as I have them organized as I do, I would recommend any one of these if someone asked - but if you had interest in the plots of the ones towards the bottom, I would just advise you read those first so that they can just get better and better as you go!)

The Last House Guest just so happened to be my Last Megan Miranda book (for the time being) and I think it was a really nice one to go out on. I liked the way it kept going back and forth with the competing timelines, and I was genuinely shocked a number of times.

I love how the author manages to sneak in so many inconsequential details about things that are actually SUPER consequential and when those things come back around you find yourself going, "How did I not see that coming???" when in fact even if you had been looking she went about it in a way that made it easy to miss.

I believed in these characters, and in the story that she told. I believed in the motivations, I believed in the practicality of it, I believed in the plausibility of it. There were a couple of character relationships I would have liked to see a bit more backstory / depth / conclusion on, but when you look at the way the novel is set up I truly believe she closed out all the paths that were relevant to the main character in relation to her story & arc at this time, and ultimately I'm just gonna let it slide!

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minimicropup's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

One of the only things I liked about this book was that I found the Lit Society Podcast bc of it.

Narration: 👍
Narrator voice was good. Not monotonous and able to pick up on different characters w/o being overdone.

Atmosphere: 🤔
Pretty well described, but flat. You could imagine any place with water, a cliff, and some trees. The town is repetitively described as an entity to the point of being assigned human traits. Hard to locate myself and if I let my imagination run wild it’d be smashed randomly. Lots of me going ‘wait, they ran past A to get to B… isn’t B on the other side of the town in the opposite direction?’

POV: 🥴
-MC is a young adult with some trauma and grief in their recent past and a bit obsessive/naively intrusive with their friend’s family. They’re making questionable decisions due to the trauma and lack of experience
-The MCs experiences are recounted late summer at a party, and then a year later. Same characters (er, minus one) and setting so it gets SO confusing as the timelines jump around AND it isn’t chronological within each year. I was lost for which year we were in if I missed the chapter heading or took a break. Easily could have written most of this chronologically in 2 parts (year 1 and 2).

Reading Journey: 😵‍💫
Scenic road trip to a cottage weekend, turns into “omg wtf why are you taking us this route” arguments, turns into getting there late with everyone cranky and tired.

Growls and Howls: 🐺
Overall it was a good plot but the writing style and “villain”destroyed it. There were a lot of annoying world salads …kinda like “she took in the ocean breeze as a reminder of the town and it’s salty hold on those who crossed it’s path, like Sadie and so many of the memories she left behind”. The “divide” between townies and tourists was overly done trying to put the friendship between Avery and Sadie on Romeo and Juliet levels.

Show’n’tell: 🥴
Mostly show, but weirdly. Like bringing a crayon on bring-your-pet-to-school day (is that still a thing?)

Good match if you like:
-late summer vibes
-party mysteries
-naive characters lacking self awareness (I love MCs like this)
-rich people behaving badly
-corruption
-villain monologue (for me, this instantly transforms an entire novel into a poorly animated children’s cartoon)

Vibes: ☺️🤨🫤

Format: Audible and Library E-book via Libby

Content Warnings