Trigger warning: Animal abuse
Sorry. I did not like this one. I get that it has some fans, but it had me going WTF through most of it and it was so damn slow until the 50 percent mark. I think it took way too long to start to tie the threads of the book together and way too long for the explanation of Rob and her marriage to Irving. I just in the end was glad to put this one down.
Sundial follows wife and mother, Rob. She is in an unhappy marriage to her husband Irving and has her two daughters, Callie and Annie. After an incident with her oldest daughter Callie, Rob decides that she and Callie will go and stay at her family’s place called Sundial. Sundial is a remote commune/lab that Rob’s family owned and lived at in the Mojave desert. While at Sundial Rob tells the Callie the story of her and her sister Jack and what really went on at Sundial.
Look, I am not against disliking all of the characters in a book before, but good grief it was a lot in this one. I didn’t really care for Rob since she seemed to be a pushover that I didn’t grasp until you get the back to back reveals. And then Callie’s POVs were just a lot to even wade through. When we have Rob in the present and Rob then, along with a fictional story and I just thought I was going to pull my hair out. I think the Rob then POVs were really slow and I started to wonder what was even the point, until we started to get more insight into her and her family. As I said above, it took til about the 50 percent book for the plot (I am guessing really since I have this in paperback format) to just come together a lot clearly for me while reading. Callie’s POVs added some depth to the story, but not really since that characters does a 180 at the end. The fictional story could have been cut. I am still confused why it was even there except we are told at one point Rob took English Lit so I am guessing the story is something her character was supposed to write or would write? I don’t know, I give up.
There’s a whole subplot that really comes down to nature versus nurture and I don’t know much what to do with that since it was very science-y fiction-y for me and I was just like okay this really doesn’t work at this point.
I won’t lie, the ending was very satisfying and if the book had just been that it would have gotten 5 stars from me.
