So. This was bad. Like so many levels of badness. I think at one time I went, why is this happening. I read this til I went to bed last night. So one good thing, this book was so bad, I didn’t watch the Oscars live and see the you know what that happened between [redacted] and [redacted]. But seriously let’s start off with the plot made no sense, the characters are cardboard cutouts, the writing/dialogue was terrible, the flow was awful, and that ending….nope.
“The Paris Apartment” follows Jess, who decides to invite herself to stay with her half brother at his apartment in Paris. Jess is hiding from something and thinks that staying with Ben will help her out short-term. Also in her mind, Ben owes her. However, when Jess gets there, Ben is nowhere to be found, and she has “sneak” her way into his place. Jess starts to get scared thinking something happened to Ben, but the other apartment dwellers all seem to be hiding dangerous secrets of their own.
So I can’t say much about anyone since Foley decided to tell the story of like 8 people in short 3 page chapters. Besides Ben’s brief POV, we then have Jess, Sophie (an older woman living in the penthouse), the Concierge (an older women who is hiding things because reasons), Mimi (a young woman who was obsessed with Ben), and Nick (an old school friend of Ben’s who told him about the apartment in the first place). Everyone is given short shrift in this novel. Honestly, I felt like Foley wrote this in mind to this being turned into a movie or something, because it’s the only reason why she didn’t delve enough into everyone. And then things get thrown at us via these characters at a ridiculous pace.
The writing was not really there for this. Did anyone else think the writing was great? Maybe because we don’t stay with everyone a lot and there’s no development besides, X, Y, Z, etc. are hiding something…sinister every few moments.
The pace was awful. Trying to juggle this many people and the plot just didn’t work. And the plot of Ben’s missing quickly turned into, what are all of these people hiding. The reveal made me laugh until my eyes watered by the way. Not in a good way. I sometimes wonder if authors who write thriller/suspense novels are only thinking of the twist, and what needs to actually be laid out to make that twist work? People can fight me on this if they want to, but “Girl on a Train” was not good. And it’s not because of that lame twist that came. “Gone Girl” worked because we got hit with something we had no clue of and then everything fit. Think of why so many people loved “Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” because you got lured in as a reader to thinking the story was going to go some way and were gobsmacked when it did not.
The setting of this apartment building in Paris should have been more exciting, but it didn’t work for me. We barely leave the apartment except a handful of times and the book just felt out of place for the city it was set in.
The ending didn’t work, on any level.
