Usually, Stephen King has a really nice set up and a bad ending, but this time around, Cujo has the reverse problem. A good two thirds of the book is Usually, Stephen King has a really nice set up and a bad ending, but this time around, Cujo has the reverse problem. A good two thirds of the book is spent on developing characters and subplots that are either super boring or super unlikeable.
The anti-vaxer hillbillies who go on vacation and leave Cujo behind? I didn't need the subplot of their vacation.
The ad-man and the cereal campaign? Less than zero fucks given.
The wife who cheats on the ad man with a junkie? Her annoying kid? Yes, they're important to the story, but I was rooting for the dog.
The rabid dog was the only character I felt any kind of sympathy for. The only one I could empathize. The three stars are for him. The entire thing is so idiotic and contrived it's actually a little disappointing he didn't kill more people......more
I don't like the story all that much. The humour is a bit forced at times. Genocide jokes hit different in 2025. But the audiobook was really well donI don't like the story all that much. The humour is a bit forced at times. Genocide jokes hit different in 2025. But the audiobook was really well done and I'd feel bad giving it anything less than 4 stars. The audiobook direction and narration were really good and did all the heavy lifting throughout all the parts where this would have become a DNF for me. ...more
And this is the book where it fully becomes a slice of life, where the MC becomes an OP dragon-slayer. It's a fast-paced slice of life so it's not harAnd this is the book where it fully becomes a slice of life, where the MC becomes an OP dragon-slayer. It's a fast-paced slice of life so it's not hard to read at all but very little happens other than the MC becomes better at everything. There's very little genuine conflict. Things that I was looking forward to never happened. The characters who could have presented a source of conflict are barely an inconvenience to kill off....more
Four stars given for the potential that it had. I liked the introduction of the drakes and wyverns, and the addition of new characters.
There wasn't aFour stars given for the potential that it had. I liked the introduction of the drakes and wyverns, and the addition of new characters.
There wasn't a lot of conflict going on in the first book but the sequel added the potential for conflict. Up until a certain point in the end (view spoiler)[when Eryk starts killing dragons with one move (hide spoiler)] I was fully expecting a big showdown between multiple people. For truths to be revealed and for all the setup to pay off with lines being drawn in the sand and some serious fights and worldbuilding.
It didn't happen, but it was well paced and the momentum carried me through the massive disappointment at the end which would have been a DNF point for me otherwise....more
There are regular Isekai characters who end up in a different world and have strong feelings about it, and then there's Eryk who ends up in a differenThere are regular Isekai characters who end up in a different world and have strong feelings about it, and then there's Eryk who ends up in a different world and somehow becomes a grifter/klepto.
It's refreshing in the sense that he's not out to save a dying parent and he's not trying to rescue a younger sibling. This guy is the definition of going with the flow and rolling with the punches....more
That awkward moment when you realise your entire life is a checklist of symptoms nobody noticed... [image]
An entire audiobook over ten hours long thatThat awkward moment when you realise your entire life is a checklist of symptoms nobody noticed... [image]
An entire audiobook over ten hours long that covers everything. From being the weird child at school who threw up on other students because the rice wasn't the correct temperature to being a grown-ass adult who still trips over their own feet...
I feel like I either need to become an activist or a serial killer with a manifesto at this point. No middle ground....more
There is one timeline where the old lady retells her story. She's about 80 years old, but she wanted to be a novelist soA melodramatic waste of time.
There is one timeline where the old lady retells her story. She's about 80 years old, but she wanted to be a novelist so instead of telling her story efficiently, we get an 80-year-old telling a YA handyman romance.
And then there's the other line where the nurse reads the notes. And then she thinks about them. And then she discusses them with someone else. And then the old lady reacts to the nurse's interpretation of the story and updates the knowledge pool... And this goes on over and over and over in a loop. Infinite regurgitation.
Truly mind-numbing. I don't know how anyone can like this because of the plot twists. This is pretty standard soap opera melodrama. An episode ends with one ounce of plot, and then the entire cast has to react to it, and then another ounce of plot...
The writing is so bad... It's a first-person POV where characters talk about the depths of their despair and the betrayal rushing through them and every single cliche turn of phrase. There's so much gasping and shuddering and surging rages. Worse, the audiobook narrator actually tries to follow the stage cues, so honestly it's like listening to a telenovela. And not just a regular telenovela but a parody of a telenovela. It's dumb and over-the-top in an Indian soap opera way.
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Except the author isn't doing it for laughs. And that was sad and scary. I spent a lot of time thinking about a man writing these horrible, one-dimensional female characters, and just felt sad, tbh. You can feel how much effort he's putting into this one dimension... So much effort that the male characters are reduced to semi-dimensional, single-thought shadows of an idea.
This audiobook is thirteen or fourteen hours of gasping and "As a caregiver..." and probably 10 minutes of actual plot and character development.
Not even going to comment on the two plot twists at the end. M. Night Shyamalan really broke a lot of people's brains. If it wasn't for him, a publishing company would have read this and just told Riley Sager, "Dude, no. WTF?" I'm not even going to count the gay reveal as a plot twist, because no....more
I want to leave one star, but I'll give it two because it had potential. The problem is that all the potential for a good horror novel was thrown awayI want to leave one star, but I'll give it two because it had potential. The problem is that all the potential for a good horror novel was thrown away for a quirky comedy.
And what's with all the good old racist characters? There was a racist neighbor in Hidden Pictures that I just finished and now a racist grandmother... My whole goal in reading some horror novels not written by Stephen King was to escape this standard character, but nope. At least when King does it, it adds to the plot in some way usually, but here it's like it's just sprinkled in for extra spice to give the protagonist the opportunity to declare out loud that they're not racist (1st person pov again.)
Deep sigh.
This is to horror novels what The Lion King is to nature documentaries on Discovery. Only a horror in the loosest most generous terms. I saw the rating but thought the blurb sounded good...
This is genuinely a 1-star horror, but the audiobook narrator did her best with the voices and I don't think anyone could have done better with all the forced quirkiness. She tried.
If this style of forced, quirky-but-unfunny comedy was a living breathing person, I'd murder it with my bare hands. I hate it so much and I don't know why you'd pick this voice for a horror novel, but that said, it's pretty decent if you don't want a horror novel. It's like if Drew Barrymore or Jennifer Aniston etc wanted to write an Evil Dead book but without all that horror stuff. Not for me, but hey, some like it hot, some like it cold....more
Not sure what this is or what it's supposed to be, just shocked that it won awards.
It's allegedly a horror novel, written in 1st person POV, and thatNot sure what this is or what it's supposed to be, just shocked that it won awards.
It's allegedly a horror novel, written in 1st person POV, and that was a big red flag off the bat, but I persevered. Waiting for the horror to kick in.
The horror never kicked in, though. It's a mystery-crime novel in which the protagonist accepts that ghosts are real about 30% in. She then tries to work along with the ghost to solve a murder mystery—the murder having occurred 80 years ago. (Very boring.)
I kept going, hoping there'd be a plot twist of some sort... And the plot twist was that the protagonist was solving the wrong murder mystery. (Somehow even more boring. Impossibly boring.)
There are a lot of reviewers giving this one star for racism, transphobia, fatphobia... All of that is arguable. I don't know what kind of point the author was trying to make, if they wanted to highlight the stigma against substance abuse, the pressure on young people to achieve excellence in academics or sport, the damage done by delinquent parents vs helicopter parents... All of that is irrelevant because this is objectively a poorly constructed horror novel.
It is structurally unsound. Readable, but there's no substance to it unless you're looking for stories about addicts beating their demons. It gets one star for that, but I'm not reading horror novels for Christian inspiration. At the very least, I need full Christian warfare against demonic forces, not some racist-next-door with a Ouijia board. It is 2024. Enough with the Ouija boards.
"Identity fraud + ghosts" is not something that needed to be converted into a 10-hour novel. That's a Scooby-Doo twenty-minute cartoon at best.
Imagine a 10-hour episode of Scooby-Doo with zero red herrings, no comic relief, no talking dog, just Fred and Daphnie but Daphnie is a recovering addict. That's what this book is....more
One of those books where you can't quite tell if the author is writing about racism or if they're just racist.
The plot: A bored, middle-aged (36) but One of those books where you can't quite tell if the author is writing about racism or if they're just racist.
The plot: A bored, middle-aged (36) but still strikingly beautiful, intelligent white woman who is tired of her perfect life, leaves her husband and son, takes a mandingo lover, and solves the mystery of a dead, golddigger/prostitute, black single mother of two boys with two deadbeat baby daddies.
Very simple white feminism plot, but it somehow takes the author ten hours and a thousand POVs to tell it. It is exactly as meandering and meaningless as it sounds. So boring I decided to use it as a lullaby, but the stereotypes were so aggravating it kept me awake.
I kept reading because of the reviews that mentioned a twist... Sigh. The twist is as mundane as the rest of the story and honestly, it's on me for not DNFing this novel because it's not like it had a good part or that it started strong... There was a POV by a psychic at 56% and there was no good reason for me to keep reading at that point, so shame on me....more
I don't know if it's the Disney propaganda or what, but sometimes you really forget exactly how racist America was just a couple years ago. InstitutioI don't know if it's the Disney propaganda or what, but sometimes you really forget exactly how racist America was just a couple years ago. Institutionally, I mean. You don't think of it in the same terms as Australia, Apartheid South Africa, Canada, Nazi Germany, Israel, etc... But yeah, Dennis Lehane decided with this novel to just really remind you, so we have this story that's a murder mystery set in Boston during the years when they were de-segregating the schools.
The protagonist is deeply unlikeable... Her daughter is also deeply unlikeable.
You can empathise, but it's also a case of "How invested am I in this story of a racist vs racist pedophiles and racist drug dealers over the death of her daughter last seen committing hate crimes?" It's had to muster up sympathy for the dead girl, hard to get on board with her mother trying to avenge her... It's like you want to feel bad for her since she's the victim of a pedophile, but then it's like, if the pedophile was black she would've probably killed him like a dog in the street or rallied the entire neighborhood to do a lynching so how sorry am I supposed to feel for her? Why do I care?
It's well-written though. Aside from the heavy n-word usage. Tarantino is somewhere reading this and saying, "This is too much..." But then again, it feels authentic to the 70s and 80s when grown adults decided to form angry mobs to harass black children who just wanted an education.
I like the writing though. The author isn't trying to do a lot of poetic prose. The style is just really dry and the pacing is good. And even when you don't like any of the characters at all and don't much care for the mystery, it's still an easy read that keeps you going from one chapter to the next....more
I watched the movie first, so I guess I spoiled it for myself, but it's still a good read. Excellent pacing. Excellent narration in the audiobook. So I watched the movie first, so I guess I spoiled it for myself, but it's still a good read. Excellent pacing. Excellent narration in the audiobook. So much so, I want to give some other Dennis Lehane books a try and see how it goes. No fancy prose, but excellent storytelling.
Haunting. I think I cried at one point. Not from anything in the plot per se. Just for the state of mental health and how it goes. We haven't actually come a long way from the lobotomy days or the crazy farm days. It's just sad, really....more
I promised myself to stop reading Stephen King novels after I had to DNF but then I figured that there was no harm in going back to the early days andI promised myself to stop reading Stephen King novels after I had to DNF but then I figured that there was no harm in going back to the early days and reading the classics. The wheels don't fall off on this one until maybe 80% where, for some unknowable reason, he decided to get into the logistics of grave-robbing and different coffin-burying methods... But then he put the wheels back on to stick the ending, and this is probably in my Top 10 SK novels.
The entire family was a little too annoying so I sort of actively wanted them dead and got a little impatient. I'd say it's probably 2 or 3 hours too long, but it's one of the best ones despite that....more
During my hair week, I rewatched Black Sails for the fourth time probably, but when I finished I realised that I couldn't actually remember Treasure IDuring my hair week, I rewatched Black Sails for the fourth time probably, but when I finished I realised that I couldn't actually remember Treasure Island at all so I decided to reread it.
I don't like Jim, and I'm forever going to be Team Flint, and Black Sails might just be John Silver propaganda, but it's officially my canon version of events, and this novel is just some weird fever dream I don't have to worry too much about.
It worked as a horror-comedy. Between the writing and the audiobook narration, it was probably a five-star read up until about 60% in. There were multIt worked as a horror-comedy. Between the writing and the audiobook narration, it was probably a five-star read up until about 60% in. There were multiple laugh-out-loud moments, and I was going to give it five stars because the audiobook was wonderful. But then the author tried to make it a horror-comedy-romance-police thriller and the wheels started falling off a bit. This simply wasn't the type of story that needed a happy romantic ending.
Also, it's relatively short. Just about 6 hours, and there just wasn't enough plot and character development in there to really get a full-blown romance and crime thriller going. The horror element was almost completely non-existent tbh. It works as a fun comedy to listen to if you have nothing else to do and want a laugh....more
Not quite my jam, but a fun character. It's a good audiobook experience. It might not work very well as a standalone novel, but it's a good installmenNot quite my jam, but a fun character. It's a good audiobook experience. It might not work very well as a standalone novel, but it's a good installment. ...more
I think books like these serve as examples of why self-published people might not trust editors and trad-publishing anymore. This book was published bI think books like these serve as examples of why self-published people might not trust editors and trad-publishing anymore. This book was published by Harper Collins, one of the Big Five. It wasn't just the author. An entire team of industry professionals put this book together and put it up for sale.
The typos and grammatical errors had me thinking I'd gotten a bad copy somehow. I was genuinely confused as to how it was possible, but when I came to GR I saw that many people were complaining about it. It wasn't just me. The book has Wattpad-level errors. I can't recall a single other time when I read a trad-published novel and had questions about the sentence structure or if English was the author's first language. The writing style was so basic, the prose was flat and redundant, and yet, the author was struggling to put paragraphs together coherently. It's just bizarre. For example, there are about ten or twenty uses of the adverb "verbally" in sentences like, "The argument continued and they verbally battled each other." As opposed to what, telepathically?
Cell phones exist, but Lila looks up her murder research in textbooks and uses tape recorders...
But all these are minor grievances. The worst crime was poor worldbuilding. And the character development. And the plot. The author could have very easily done a first-person unreliable narrator story, but for some bizarre reason, Pretty Little Wife turned out to be an Unreliable Author story. The typos are just the tip of the iceberg. Only an indicator of how little care was put into this.
Lila 1.0 is the version that starts the story as a psychologically abused trophy wife. We're told that her husband has been gaslighting her for years to the point where she's unsure about everything and extremely disoriented as she realizes how she's been manipulated and abused for years. She panics a lot. Gets dizzy a lot. Faints more than Jean Gray, and emotions are always rushing through her or cutting through her... The author might have been trying to hint at her dissociating under stress, so we have paragraphs of "She made her body move." "Her body fell over." She's a glamorous, old Hollywood, ghostly woman who's been beaten down by every single man in her life to the point where she just can't take it.
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That's how it starts. Sad female victim, big bad wolf man who has squeezed the life out of her, literally.
And then, it changes and we're introduced to Lila 2.0 who is a stone-cold, emotionless, cynical and jaded, professional woman who can "verbally and intellectually battle" with the best of them. She's no random victim. She's a super-intelligent criminal defense lawyer with shrewd instincts and the profile-reading skills of Sherlock Holmes. She's planned the perfect crime, but some other killer has derailed her plans, and we're supposed to take it that Lila is now fighting a battle on two fronts, one against the police and one against a mystery player. Is she smart enough to get the best of them?
You see her father was a pedophile, rapist, and killer, and she vowed to never let it happen again, so she can't possibly let Aaron get away with it. Should she call the police? Is the age of consent 16 in North Carolina and 17 in New York? Should his "victims" be allowed some agency? Should they decide for themselves what kind of justice or retribution they want? Are there younger girls involved? Should there be a thorough investigation to reveal the full truth of the crime and all Aaron's potential accomplices? These questions don't occur to her. The punishment is death and she is She-Ra.
Now I'm not defending pedophiles or Aaron (the evil husband) or teachers who go after students in real life, but at the same point in time, you can't just run up and shoot Brigitte Macron in the face because you have strong feelings about what she did.
She's killing him because she's having an emotional reaction and wants to save the girls, but then she also takes her time for weeks and weeks, months honestly, just holding on to the tapes and then lying to the police in every "verbal battle" instead of telling the truth.
The author legit thought that this made sense. That Lila made sense. A criminal lawyer turned criminal in the name of defending the innocent this time around. But it just doesn't make sense.
Does it make sense for a criminal defense lawyer with strong principles to abandon her own firm to become the trophy wife of a high school math teacher?
If she's so smart, then doesn't that make Aaron some kind of genius mastermind? Because he convinced her to give up law and become a stay-at-home tradwife. Think about it.
He didn't lure her in with his millions of dollars because she describes him as cheap and he only gives her just enough money to pay the bills. He openly rubs it in her face that he's leaving his money to his brother in case he dies, so she stands to inherit absolutely nothing from him.
From her own point of view, she describes their marriage as loveless. He takes every opportunity to make her feel stupid and put her down and be demeaning, crushing all her sense of self-worth and pride. Every single thing about him irritates her.
They don't even have children so it's not like he's holding that over her head either.
She's just there with this guy who is a full-time high school teacher and hockey coach, and since he doesn't want her working, she's essentially just a trad wife with nothing but time on her hands. She has a background in criminal law. She listens to true crime podcasts constantly. And yet, not a single red flag ever pops up for her, even with Aaron inviting the girls into their house. They're literally making sextapes in the housewife's house and she is none-the-wiser, so honestly, my only takeaway is that Aaron has top-tier time management skills and is a genius-level Professor X level master pedophile.
I mean, think about it. This guy spends the bulk of his time being a pedophile at the school where he teaches. In two different states. Not one girl or two, but dozens of girls and she doesn't have a clue. No one does. It's seamless. I still can't even wrap my head around it, just because of the numbers. He's basically running an Epstein-level operation just for his own personal kicks, videos included for his own entertainment.
He's not R Kelly. He's not promising them millions of dollars and singing careers. He's not Larry Nassar either, where he has the power to make or break these girls' lifelong dreams. No, he's luring the girls to him by doing the little things. Boosting their GPA, changing their grades, getting them into good colleges using his math teacher connections... And he pulls all of this off flawlessly for decades at two different schools. He's so good at it, he goes and marries a shrewd, cynical, criminal defense lawyer whose father was a pedophile as well. Just to give himself a challenge.
In fact, he's actually considered something of a hero to the small town. When he goes missing, Lila doesn't even know how to get past all the insane levels of hero worship.
Not sure why he's a hero or why the town worships him. They never mention him winning any championships with the field hockey team, so I have to assume it's because of the legions of girls he's gotten into top-notch colleges. That's the only thing I can think of as to why he's so beloved. I imagine there are fliers at the local churches saying "If your 16-year-old is failing math, let her take a class with Aaron and he'll get her into Harvard."
The author never develops this.
We're simply told that the minute it gets out that Aaron's missing, the town immediately turns on Lila. Not just rumors, but immediately calling her up with death threats, (why she answers unknown numbers is still confusing me, but maybe they're calling on the landline phone in the kitchen?) and they start throwing bricks through glass windows... They just love this high school math teacher so much...
At first, I started thinking that these were Aaron's girls. That he'd told them some story about his wife trying to kill him. But no, it's everyone. Grown adults. Because everyone loves Aaron.
Aaron is charming the way Lila is smart. We never see it but the author tells us a hundred times, so we accept it.
It's not a well-developed world. The characters are one-dimensional. Female characters - good, victims, survivors, or oppressed. Male characters - bad, disloyal, misogyny bros. (Except for the one gay lawyer who is good.)
As a result of this weak level of character development, there aren't a lot of characters to be used as red herrings. It's down to her boyfriend and her brother-in-law. The character development is so thin for both of these, it's easy to get them confused, but one of them is a true crime enthusiast and the other one is the pedophile's brother.
Lila, with her shrewd instincts, prides herself on how she's maneuvering these two men around to save herself until, dun dun dun, it's revealed that the boyfriend was sleeping with her to find out more details about her father for a book he's writing (just pretend that makes sense), and her kindly brother-in-law is a serial killer.
I don't even want to call it a plot twist because there was literally no other character to put it on besides the pedophile's big brother, but again, the author doesn't do the sensible thing here and have it be a complete surprise to Lila. Nope. Instead, she wants to tease the reader with the idea that Lila knew all along that her kindly brother-in-law was a serial killer and that killing them both and inheriting the money was all in her master plan...
Now, in a sense, this is understandable, because the brother-in-law isn't a standard killer, he's a full-on, Hills-Have-Eyes, "I like to hunt the human animal for sport" type serial killer who is fond of monologues and leaving little notes behind like if he's in a Scream movie. He's so cliche that any detective worth their salt should be able to simply smell the crazy wafting off of him.
It's bad enough that Lila "Sherlock Holmes" Ridgefield was married to a serial pedophile for years, but that her best/only friend/brother-in-law is a massive serial killer who got started by killing his own mother at the ripe age of 8 or 9 or 10 because their father raised them to be psychos?
It's a hard sell to end a story like that with Sherlock Holmes being hoodwinked by Hills-Have-Eyes level evil psychos, so I fully understand the need to tweak Lila a little bit.
But the thing about tweaking a character and adding a plot twist is that you have to scroll up and fill in all the plotholes you create in order for it to be plausible. If your plot twist isn't plausible, that's not an unreliable narrator, that's an author having no clue how a novel works.
This author really didn't have a clue as to what she was doing. For a good half of the book, the suspense is generated by whether Aaron is alive or dead—how am I supposed to take your heroine seriously if she's a criminal defense lawyer who doesn't know how to check if someone is alive or dead? If she walked away from the crime scene with doubts about Aaron being alive or dead, she's at best incompetent.
Write a story about an airhead or an alcoholic who's improvising as she goes... Easy fix. But no. Everyone still wants to try their hand at writing an Amazing Amy....more
The mystery starts a little rough, in that there's a killer right there in the prologue. There's no whodunit —the methhead dunnit—and there's no whyduThe mystery starts a little rough, in that there's a killer right there in the prologue. There's no whodunit —the methhead dunnit—and there's no whydunnit—he's a methhead, so there's not a lot a lot of mystery going on. All that's left to wonder about is whether or not they will be found in time and how.
The whole story is just... good enough. Some parts are very good: the pacing and the dialogue especially. It never feels heavy or bogged down, but the characters and the plot are not the best, and the ending is so wishy-washy that it ends on three stars for me. The ending was... not the best. It did not stick the landing.
There's a subplot about a meth gang that feels like too much and not enough at the same time, and maybe the story might have been better if it focused on being a crime novel instead of a suspense-thriller. I'm writing this review a couple weeks after reading it and I honestly can't remember anything more about it than it being completely "meh." Doesn't come close to The Dry, much less Force of Nature....more
I listened to the first chapter of this story and figured out the entire thing. My brother had recommended the book to me and I looked him in the eye I listened to the first chapter of this story and figured out the entire thing. My brother had recommended the book to me and I looked him in the eye and asked, "Is this what happened?" He looked me in the eye and lied.
Maybe this is a good story, I don't know. But I had just watched a TV series called Safe Home with this exact plot line. The very exact plotline, the same characters, the same everything, minus the meth. It's just... the most basic "mystery" with the most basic, most obvious suspect. There's not even a red herring to distract you. It's just... What you see at the very beginning is what you get. No twists. No hidden revelations. Just a lot of empty drama.
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