A review by manicpixl
No Exit by Taylor Adams

dark fast-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? No

2.0

I was really hoping to like this book, after I heard it mentioned positively so many times, and I generally enjoy isolation thrillers.
Unfortunately, this one didn't do it for me. 
At first it was a quick read, so I wanted to finished it, and I did, but it started to drag sometime after the half-way point and I found myself skim reading some passages.
  • I found the plot beats entirely predictable and not even well executed.
  • During the whole book I failed to get a grip on the spacial and temporal descriptions. At least once per scene I was completely disoriented as to where everyone and everything was or how they moved around. I had no concept of the distances since sometimes a movement was described in such details that it took pages, and I thought it must have taken minutes, when it seem the author wanted to convey seconds. I found myself wondering: Is this urgent? Is this slow? Are the sixty seconds mentioned over yet? Are they far from each other? I never knew. (I'm not a native English speaker, so take this with a grain of salt, but I've almost exclusively read English novels for the last 20 years, and this is not a problem that I usually encounter.)
  • The characters are clichéd, stereotypical and two dimensional. Unfortunately, don't have anything else to say about them.
  • The point of view seemed inconsistent to me: Most of the time it was clearly third person limited, but sometimes, especially in Darby's perspective, as the main character, facts were used she couldn't know or things described she couldn't possible see
  • When the point of view shifted, which was so rare that it always felt jarring, the writing style didn't shift with it, so the other characters third person limited sounded just as Darby, which for me was even more jarring (this can be considered nit-picky, but the fact that this took me out of the story this noticibly, to me speaks for itself)
  • I might have respected the book a little bit more if it had had the guts to actually kill off Darcy in the end, instead of the very transparent fake-out in the last chapter

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