Bodie Kane’s high school experience was struck by tragedy when her former roommate was murdered in their senior year. Now, over 20 years later, Bodie is a successful film professor and podcaster who is invited back to her New Hampshire boarding school to teach a couple of classes. There, she is drawn back into the case and wonders if the right suspect was convicted or if the police and school overlooked other persons of interest.
This book is super hyped and a lot of people I follow on social media have loved it so I put it on my list to read. Unfortunately, I didn’t love it and found it to be quite underwhelming and boring.
For me, this book was really slow and far too long. I actually put it down for three days when I was busy with work and had no time to read and I had to force myself to come back and finish reading it. I thought it would pick up once we got to Part 2, but even that section dragged. I’ve seen this book advertised as a thriller and to me, there was nothing thrilling about it. It was way too slow and drawn out to be a thriller.
There were so many characters to keep track of and I kept getting confused on who everyone was. There was a long list of students that Bodie went to school with that she talked about in the past timelines. There were more characters in the present timelines and I eventually gave up on trying to keep everyone straight.
I didn’t find any of the characters interesting, especially Bodie. She was pretty annoying and self-centered. There were a lot of times when she messed up in the book, like drunk replying to a Twitter post, and I had zero sympathy for her. I also was not invested in finding out who killed her old roommate. The roommate’s character wasn’t really developed so she felt like just a random person who died and I didn’t care about her.
The book tries really hard to fit in a lot of social issues and, I’m not going to lie, I prefer my fiction to be fun and not bogged down by social commentary. I’m also getting a little tired of this plot line that has become popular in the past five years or so where a group of friends were in high school or college together and someone died and then years later they get together for either a reunion or something else only to find out that the sketchy person who was convicted of the murder didn’t really do it and it was really one of the friend group. I feel like I’ve read so many of these books with this plotline and I’m a bit over it.
I also did like the ending at all and found it extremely unsatisfying.
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