Ambrose
8/24/2023
I guess I'll start off by saying I saw a lot of good things in this book. Even though I have some criticisms it was well written, as I expected it to be. When a book has 900K ratings my expectations rise for at least the prose of a novel. There were tons of witty and quotable lines that are common in books like these. It had a good ending, and it was pretty believable. I mean, all in all, it wasn't a bad book. it just wasn't what IN MY OPINION it could have been.
So now, why I think it could have been executed better. I've been reading some of the more popular books recently like "The Silent Patient," "Gone Girl", and "Where the Crawdads Sing," (The funny thing is all four books use flashbacks as part of the storytelling, which is weird right? Is that the secret to writing a uber popular book?) The reason I read this one was because of the gimmick, a girl cursed to never be remembered by anyone who sees her but has eternal life. That sounded like so much fun to me, and with the raving reviews, I assumed it was pulled off really well too. It was pulled off, but I think this book was written in the wrong genre. I was so annoyed that this book turned into a romance book. You have all of these pathways to choose about what Addie can do REGARDLESS of her limitations. And the book becomes a romance just like a book written without the enticing gimmick. I had so many questions about the curse, and she could have done so much with her life, and who knows maybe she did. But all we get in the book is this weird love triangle thing that's not really a love triangle now that I think about it. It got repetitive too. Nothing happened for a lot of the book, so much was in the past that the present didn't change as quickly as I wanted it to. The curse was not explored to its fullest potential. It could have been FASCINATING, I know I would have used eternal life like Addie's in much more interesting ways... wheres my dark god to curse me?