A review by carleneinspired
The Burial Society by Nina Sadowsky
3.0
The Burial Society has the sort of passages and fantastic phrasings you could highlight all day long, but there's no real connection between those and the story itself. The concept of a business that extracts people from dangerous, unsafe conditions and helps them start anew, all while getting revenge against the bad guys, is fantastic, but it's a large idea that requires a lot of book to come to life. We're sold on this book by the blurb, with varying people expressing their opinion on whether we should be told Natalie's story or Catherine's story...rather than told five different character's stories all at once, which is what we really get. There's Catherine, Natalie, Jake, Frank, and their poor deceased mother. There's the present day, the past, first person perspective, and even third person perspective all mixed in to one book. If that sounds confusing then I've made my point clear. There's a murder, there's misguided, lost young adult children, and there's two outsiders who are just a bit too involved for things to be normal. Each character was so complex and their perspective so different, really making for a multifaceted mystery that had so many variations of the truth. Plus, three of the four are fairly unreliable, which we all know is my favorite. Mix in a bit of murder, a heaping pile of lies, and a woman who goes by many names and has a pile of tricks up her sleeve and you've got The Burial Society. It's an incredibly interesting plot and Nina Sadowsky reveals her writing skills with the extensive development given to the murder and aftermath, but the layout just doesn't work for the story.
The idea of The Burial Society is a great one, but the execution just didn't work out in my opinion. The changing perspective, changing tense, and alternating time frames really made for a lot more work as a reader than I find necessary in a novel. I love a good whodunit type of book, but if I can guess it right away and I'm still lead on a very long wild goose chase it no longer is entertaining. The most interesting story was Catherine's, we're drawn into it by the promise of more later on, but we're never given it. We're left to guess her true intentions and about her previous cases, left only with her ties to the Burrows' unfortunate incidents.
Overall, The Burial Society is a unique novel, one that'll tick all the boxes if you're looking for something new, but that doesn't make up for the excess details, very short chapters, and frequently changing POV. Though I read the book in one sitting, I wasn't left with any "AHA that was great" moment and no real understanding of the story Nina Sadowsky intended tell. I likely wouldn't read this again, nor would I recommend it to friends. Unfortunate miss for me.
ARC provided.
The idea of The Burial Society is a great one, but the execution just didn't work out in my opinion. The changing perspective, changing tense, and alternating time frames really made for a lot more work as a reader than I find necessary in a novel. I love a good whodunit type of book, but if I can guess it right away and I'm still lead on a very long wild goose chase it no longer is entertaining. The most interesting story was Catherine's, we're drawn into it by the promise of more later on, but we're never given it. We're left to guess her true intentions and about her previous cases, left only with her ties to the Burrows' unfortunate incidents.
Overall, The Burial Society is a unique novel, one that'll tick all the boxes if you're looking for something new, but that doesn't make up for the excess details, very short chapters, and frequently changing POV. Though I read the book in one sitting, I wasn't left with any "AHA that was great" moment and no real understanding of the story Nina Sadowsky intended tell. I likely wouldn't read this again, nor would I recommend it to friends. Unfortunate miss for me.
ARC provided.