I enjoyed Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 well enough but her debut, In a Dark, Dark Wood, is a better novel. Both stories involve a somewhat unstable female narrator who is taken out of her comfort zone and thrust into a series of psychological mind fucks. While very few books in the “unreliable female protagonist” genre have hit the high bar Gone Girl set Ware comes closer than most with In a Dark, Dark Wood. Nora is a crime writer with a passion for jogging who is invited to […]
Why with the ridiculous female protagonist? WHY?
I always feel torn about books like this one. There are so many flaws, and yet, I still sorta enjoyed it. The main character, Lo, is a travel journalist who is setting out on the maiden voyage of a luxury yacht, headed to view the Northern Lights in Scandinavia. Days before leaving on the trip, her apartment is burgled while she is home, she has a huge fight with her boyfriend, and is generally on edge. The first night on the boat, she hears a […]
Like hope, stupid also floats.
Quite possibly the stupidest, most aggravating character in recent memory blunders her way through a mystery like an amateur Inspector Clouseau. It’s staggering how many poor decisions our hero Laura “Lo” Blacklock makes on a minute to minute basis. I had to keep checking that the author wasn’t actually a man writing under a woman’s pseudonym because this is one of the most misogynistic books I’ve read in some time. Sample dialogue: “I groaned at my own stupidity…” “Why didn’t I listen to…” “How could […]
Better than expected
Others have drawn comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and, being the natural conformist that I am, I’m not going to buck the trend. If you like your female mystery novel narrators on the unreliable side, this may be the book for you. Which is a weird burgeoning trope, if, indeed, three books can be considered a trope. Sometimes, a culture just decides that it’s ready for something. We all consume, basically, the same information. So its not surprising that there would be […]