I heard rave reviews about this title, but I must admit that I was really disappointed. Overall, the book isn’t as ‘haunting’ or ‘gripping’ as described. I kept waiting for a twist or for a shocking scene where I’d be desperate to get to the end, but this just didn’t happen. The ‘revelation’ at the end isn’t really that shocking because most of the book is pretty predictable and I saw it coming.
The book is from the point of view of the mother, Sarah, and she’s just not a likeable character. She has too much internal dialogue and she doesn’t let the reader realise anything for themselves. She’s also really naïve and delicate, and she asks too many rhetorical questions. She comes across as slightly neurotic, and the reader doesn’t like her enough to disregard her flaws.
I quite liked the husband, Angus. He was authentic and his societal reactions were realistic and effective to the plot. You are positioned to hate him in the novel because his daughter is supposedly ‘scared of him’, but it’s quite clear that he’s not the bad guy.
The setting in the novel helps to isolate the characters and force the reader to really focus on the plot and the relations between Angus and Sarah. I think the author did well to pace the story so that it didn’t move too quickly but it didn’t move too slowly either.
I do think it was missing something – the story just didn’t grab me. Maybe it was the characters and the circumstances. Maybe it was the setting. Or maybe it was the farfetched nature of the premise that disappointed me.
I really struggled with this one. It was kind of a snoozefest. A well-written snoozefest. But let me start with some positives. All of the characters seem to suffer some kind of emotional loss, which is hard for an author to write. John Green manages to write this well and with a lot of literary subtly. The chapters are short, the novel is short, and there is a fair bit of humour in the story to break up the mundane lives of the characters. Also, there’s a certain level of maths mentioned in this book, and it all seemed legit. And this is surprising, since it was all equations and formulas. It sounded like it worked perfectly, so kudos to John Green for that.
But there were many, many negatives. Firstly, the three books I’ve read so far of John Green’s (The Fault in our Stars and Looking for Alaska) ALL seem to have characters that are emotionally lost in life. It’s getting kind of boring, and this story really dragged. Colin and Hussan were supposed to go on a road trip, but the entire story is about their first stop. That’s not really a road trip. Also, the characters aren’t really relatable, and I found them quite boring. Lindsey is unrealistic, and so is the social dynamic between Colin and Hussan. The pace of this novel is too slow and the reader will constantly wonder where the novel is going.
I only recommend this novel to avid John Green fans.