A review by 85tarheel
After She Wrote Him by Sulari Gentill

2.0

“All novels are self-referential to some extent” says one of the characters in “After She Wrote Him”, and this novel takes that to an extreme. Talk about meta, this is a book written by an author about an author writing a book about an author who is writing a book about an author. I am not making that up. I enjoyed some of the set up in this book and definitely enjoyed seeing the various authors plying their craft, but there is a change in the story that was definitely a bridge too far for me, which I won’t mention because it would be a major spoiler. Then the book ends with one of the mystery/thriller tropes I most despise, again I won’t name it, but that sealed the deal for me. A criticism leveled about one of the stories within the novel rings very true, “They say the novel doesn’t know what it is: crime fiction, memoir, literary fiction…” A well written book that ended up being about something other than I thought it was going to be, and what it ended up being was disappointing to me.