Book Review | Book Chatter

The Visitors
By Catherine Burns
Gallery/Scout Press, 9781501164019, September 26, 2017, 304pp.

The Short of It:

Once you figure out who the “visitors” are, you quickly realize how horrible the situation is.

The Rest of It:

Marion lives with her older brother John. She’s a spinster and the two live a somewhat quiet life. Mostly because John is not the most social of people. Together, they live in a run-down mansion and although Marion sometimes dreams of life outside its walls, she is too self-conscious of herself to make any friends of her own and why bother anyway? No one would care to know her the way she looks. She’s plain, old and completely uninteresting.

But the real reason she stays close to home is because her brother John is different. Disturbed, I should say. He doesn’t approve of her having any friends and he is unable to make any of his own given his harshness and lack of manners.

Things change when The Visitors come.

Without giving the secret away, the entire book focuses on The Visitors and how they’ve come to inhabit Marion and John’s house. There are dark things going on within the house and it takes Marion a really long time to figure them out. This was rather infuriating to me as a reader but it was interesting too because Marion’s reaction to it all is not what you’d expect.

Catherine Burns does a decent job of “keeping the secret” and I found myself pretty absorbed by Marion and John’s situation but ultimately the ending was a little rushed. It’s being compared to Room and I can see that comparison but the tension is not as high in this one.

Source: Review copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley.
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

Into the Water
By Paula Hawkins
Riverhead Books, 9780735211209, May 2017, 400pp.

The Short of It:

Highly anticipated but not for me.

The Rest of It:

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. ~ Indiebound

You may recall the popularity of this author’s previous work, The Girl on the Train. That book wasn’t perfect but it was a page-turner and it kept me reading. With Into the Water, I really had to push myself to read it.

My thoughts:

In case you didn’t know, it’s about witches. Kind of.
Too much back and forth.
The characters. I had no interest in them.
Marketed as psychological suspense. No, it’s not.
Took a really long time to figure out what was going on.

I’m sure it’s very difficult to top a best seller like The Girl on the Train but this story was a bit underdeveloped. I didn’t mind the numerous points of view or even the format of the novel itself but it just didn’t grab me like her other book did.

Plus, I am not a fan of stories about witches and there was nothing about this book that mentioned witches. It alluded to secrecy and scandal and there was some of that but not enough for me to enjoy it.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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