Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not impact my rating or review.
The first part 30 percent of the book I thought was really good, but then it started to just kind of spiral and I didn’t believe anything that was happening. After a while it just felt like Rowan wanted to keep upping the kill count, no matter how absurd it started to get. I also didn’t buy the ending even a little. For something that was supposed to be a retelling of “Psycho” with Marion getting the upper hand, I thought that there were way too many different ways that Rowan could have done this, that would have worked better.
Marion A Novel follows Marion, who works at an ad agency and is dealing with the realization that her older sister is in a bad way. Her sister though needs money and doesn’t have it and neither does Marion. But when an unexpected circumstance at her agency occurs which allows Marion to get her hands on what in her world is, life-changing money. Focused on getting to her sister, she takes a bus that breaks down and then leads her to the Billings Motel which is run by Norm and his bedridden mother. Those of us who have seen “Psycho” know what is supposed to happen next, Norm appears, ready to murder, but in this novel, Marion wins and then has to decide what she’s going to do next. We also follow Hannah, a junior (I guess you can say) private investigator that is looking into the disappearance of a young woman from New York.
There were two timelines we follow, Marion and then Hannah. Looking at the dates you can see that Marion is set in the past with Hannah in the future (well October 2023 future). I thought at first that Marion was very well developed as a character, but then it just started to go sideways and then there was a whole unreliable narrator thing going on that didn’t work for me at all. And I did think that Hannah was well developed, but then the ending happened and things felt unfinished. We have Norm, his mother (and a whole thing with that was just a lot) and then Marion’s sister, her mother, her boss, her best friend at work, etc. There were a lot of moving parts and it just felt like most of the book would have worked if it was tightened up a bit.
The flow was really good at first and I didn’t want to stop reading, but after we get to the second incident I just found myself getting bored with the book. As I said up above, the ending just leaves things on an unbelievable and flat note.
