I’ve been on a bit of a thriller kick recently, so–like many other Cannonballers–I’ve read In a Dark Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. They relied very heavily on the ‘unreliable female narrator’ trope, bringing up inevitable comparisons to The Girl on the Train. They’re not as good as Girl on the Train. (I haven’t read Gone Girl, while I have seen the film, so I can’t compare there.) I’m way behind on my reviewing, but I figured I’d start with these ones. Quick […]
This is why I ignore invitations from people I haven’t spoken to in years…
I enjoyed Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10 well enough but her debut, In a Dark, Dark Wood, is a better novel. Both stories involve a somewhat unstable female narrator who is taken out of her comfort zone and thrust into a series of psychological mind fucks. While very few books in the “unreliable female protagonist” genre have hit the high bar Gone Girl set Ware comes closer than most with In a Dark, Dark Wood. Nora is a crime writer with a passion for jogging who is invited to […]
Why with the ridiculous female protagonist? WHY?
I always feel torn about books like this one. There are so many flaws, and yet, I still sorta enjoyed it. The main character, Lo, is a travel journalist who is setting out on the maiden voyage of a luxury yacht, headed to view the Northern Lights in Scandinavia. Days before leaving on the trip, her apartment is burgled while she is home, she has a huge fight with her boyfriend, and is generally on edge. The first night on the boat, she hears a […]
Like hope, stupid also floats.
Quite possibly the stupidest, most aggravating character in recent memory blunders her way through a mystery like an amateur Inspector Clouseau. It’s staggering how many poor decisions our hero Laura “Lo” Blacklock makes on a minute to minute basis. I had to keep checking that the author wasn’t actually a man writing under a woman’s pseudonym because this is one of the most misogynistic books I’ve read in some time. Sample dialogue: “I groaned at my own stupidity…” “Why didn’t I listen to…” “How could […]
Better than expected
Others have drawn comparisons to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, and, being the natural conformist that I am, I’m not going to buck the trend. If you like your female mystery novel narrators on the unreliable side, this may be the book for you. Which is a weird burgeoning trope, if, indeed, three books can be considered a trope. Sometimes, a culture just decides that it’s ready for something. We all consume, basically, the same information. So its not surprising that there would be […]
I mean it’s better, but with one huge caveat
So I thought the mystery and a “thrill” of this novel were both stronger, more interesting, and better written than her previous novel. I am generally a sucker for a good English mystery novel, and one of the major improvements in this novel from the last is that the voice itself is better rendered than the previous one. This more or less actually feels like a person, and the narrator of In a Dark Dark Wood did not. Another good step forward for this one was […]
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