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A review by pvp_niki
This Is How We End Things by R.J. Jacobs
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
I guess if you're an avid reader of crime and thriller stories you'll love this one as well. If you look for something that stands out, however, this book will not be able to deliver.
Certain genres are just not my cup of tea unless they're mixing or bending the genre or have a specific and unique theme elaborated well and extensively apart from the main plot. Crime/mystery/thriller is among these genres. What intrigued me most about this book was the science of lies and that the suspects study this topic.
This is a book with multiple POV's so I was hoping something like a lot of unreliable narrators who you cannot trust on even when they ask something, and who'd carefully manipulate their innocence appearance to the point that even their thoughts are misleading, like "think innocent then you'll act innocent naturally". However, I soon started to suspect that this wouldn't be the case and didn't really expect that a huge plot-twist would reveal the contrary (and it didn't).
If you look at it as a crime/thriller/mystery story in itself, one can say it's decent; the story, the characters, the execution, all decent but nothing groundbreaking that'd make me recommend this book over a dozens of others from the genre.
What disappoints me the most is that the science of lies appears at a very minimum level. There's a presentation of one of their experiments at the beginning where there's some mention of this, but the main aim of this scene is just to provide us with one more possible suspect. Then literally nothing. Towards the end, there's a very short conversation about this topic between a police officer and one of the undergrads and it's basically just like this: "no, officer, your information is wrong, liars don't avoid eye contact at all, if anything, sociopaths engage even more when lying". Which is funny because anything we saw about lies during the book was from this police officer's POV who was convinced she can tell if someone is lying or not and her hunches looked like working.
Otherwise, there's no more lies and talking about lies than in any other crime stories. I mean secrets and lies are the very basis of the genre, if you want to make your book revolve around this theme, you have to do more than just the "everyone has a secret in their past" trope and a lot of red herrings. Especially that I didn't find the characters very unique, most of them followed the very usual tropes of dark academia thrillers and they mostly stayed two-dimensional.
On the other hand, the execution is decent and I think it uses quite a few cinematic tropes in how it's built and especially with action-packed scenes.
As for the audiobook aspect, I think the narrator did a decent job with it. One thing that irked me however was the overwhelming amount of "he/she/Scarlet/Robert/etc. said" tags. I'm not sure though if this was due to the narrators repetitive intonation on these sentences or if there actually were more of these than in other books.
Thank you for NetGalley and the publisher for providing the ARC.
Certain genres are just not my cup of tea unless they're mixing or bending the genre or have a specific and unique theme elaborated well and extensively apart from the main plot. Crime/mystery/thriller is among these genres. What intrigued me most about this book was the science of lies and that the suspects study this topic.
This is a book with multiple POV's so I was hoping something like a lot of unreliable narrators who you cannot trust on even when they ask something, and who'd carefully manipulate their innocence appearance to the point that even their thoughts are misleading, like "think innocent then you'll act innocent naturally". However, I soon started to suspect that this wouldn't be the case and didn't really expect that a huge plot-twist would reveal the contrary (and it didn't).
If you look at it as a crime/thriller/mystery story in itself, one can say it's decent; the story, the characters, the execution, all decent but nothing groundbreaking that'd make me recommend this book over a dozens of others from the genre.
What disappoints me the most is that the science of lies appears at a very minimum level. There's a presentation of one of their experiments at the beginning where there's some mention of this, but the main aim of this scene is just to provide us with one more possible suspect. Then literally nothing. Towards the end, there's a very short conversation about this topic between a police officer and one of the undergrads and it's basically just like this: "no, officer, your information is wrong, liars don't avoid eye contact at all, if anything, sociopaths engage even more when lying". Which is funny because anything we saw about lies during the book was from this police officer's POV who was convinced she can tell if someone is lying or not and her hunches looked like working.
Otherwise, there's no more lies and talking about lies than in any other crime stories. I mean secrets and lies are the very basis of the genre, if you want to make your book revolve around this theme, you have to do more than just the "everyone has a secret in their past" trope and a lot of red herrings. Especially that I didn't find the characters very unique, most of them followed the very usual tropes of dark academia thrillers and they mostly stayed two-dimensional.
On the other hand, the execution is decent and I think it uses quite a few cinematic tropes in how it's built and especially with action-packed scenes.
As for the audiobook aspect, I think the narrator did a decent job with it. One thing that irked me however was the overwhelming amount of "he/she/Scarlet/Robert/etc. said" tags. I'm not sure though if this was due to the narrators repetitive intonation on these sentences or if there actually were more of these than in other books.
Thank you for NetGalley and the publisher for providing the ARC.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gun violence, Violence, Blood, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Murder
Minor: Addiction, Mass/school shootings, Car accident, and Suicide attempt