Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Received an arc from NetGalley for an honest review.
Thank you NetGalley for giving me the opportunity of reading this amazing book. As soon as I heard that Stephen Chbosky was writing another book I got insanely excited, without even knowing what the book was about. What I had in mind was something in the same genre as his last book, Perks of Being a Wallflower. This book is almost the complete opposite of that, and for that I am grateful.
This book was very intimidating to me. 700 freaking pages. For some people that's nothing. They can read four times that amount in a month! Well this book took me a majority of the month to read.. meaning I didn't read much else. I was not disappointed by this book in the slightest though, so I'm not upset that I haven't read any other books. Before jumping into this 700 pages seemed like an excessive amount, and some of the other reviews I have seen believe that this book could've been shorter. And I agree, but I don't at the same time. This book would've have been as intense or crazy had it been any shorter. The action-packed last half of the book would've felt incredibly rushed had this book been shorter.
Chbosky truly took me for a ride. It was like riding a roller coaster that starts out really slow, but the intensity continues to grow as you climb up the incline of the plot. But as you're climbing the incline, everything goes pitch black so you can't anticipate what the rest of the ride entails. Before you know it, everything is speeding up and there are so many unexpected twists and turns that continue until the very end of the ride. That is this book in a nutshell. The first half of the book builds the story, creates a foundation for you to feel connected to the characters. Not just Christopher or Kate either but also for the side characters that you barely know anything about, you learn just the perfect amount to remember them and their stories later down the line. All of the characters had their quirks but that is what made them interesting. The different backstories and unsaid trauma that they've gone through left me intrigued and wanting to know more about them.
Another part that made both the characters and the overall story more enjoyable was the attention to detail. I feel like this book would've been very lackluster had there not been such carefully placed descriptions throughout the entirety of the book. You know the details of the setting, characters, their thoughts, the vibe of the room and other people surrounding the scene. It makes it feel more true to life, at least in the first half. The descriptions in the second half of the book are meant to incite fear. It's supposed to be as crazy as it sounds. The fact that that first part seems so real due to the descriptiveness, it makes the second half more crazy like, "How is this happening?? There is no way this is really happening..."
I had many guesses throughout the book of what was going to happen and none of my guesses were correct. Usually I know I'm far off but this time I felt like my intuition about the nice man was close, but I couldn't have been more off. I loved how it kept me guessing. I was never bored with what was going on because something was always happening, even if it was subtle.
Another thing I liked was how the plot connected all of the characters. It wasn't like they were all separate. Some parts of the plot connected a set of characters and then one of those characters to another and another. That is another part that made me feel so invested in all of them is because their stories were all somehow related, at least that's how I saw it.
Usually this isn't a genre I would pick up, but based on how much I enjoyed this book, I would definitely pick up another horror based book. And I would very much recommend this to people who like horror or suspense filled books.
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