Oh my god, such a ridiculous book! I might just never read another novel by Mary Higgins Clark again!
I bought this book the last time I went to Blossom Book House. I had never read anything by this author and the book was really marked down, so I bought it. The blurb seemed interesting enough, but sadly the actual story was a huge letdown.
Story
The story is about Alexandra (Zan) Moreland and her quest to find her son who was kidnapped 2 years ago. He went missing when the babysitter fell asleep in the park while minding him. But Zan becomes a prime suspect in the kidnapping when she is seen picking up her son in the background of some pictures. Now she needs to prove that she is innocent as well as find her son.
Review
You know how some movies are so bad that they are good? This book went from interesting to ridiculous to funny to just bad real fast.
The book is awfully long… I mean it has 90 chapter plus an epilogue… 90! I admit, most of the chapters are just a couple of pages long, but still. Each chapter is from a different character’s point of view. This could be a great technique for a story, but there are just so many unnecessary characters’ points of view that this technique just loses its charm. The story I think could be cut so much shorter if only the editor had done a better job. The story in almost every paragraph goes into so much unnecessary detail that you forget what you were reading. Consider this:
This is one page of text (there’s more on the next page) about characters completely irrelevant to the story. I could probably cut the story to half its length by just getting rid of the needless details.
If I have to describe the writing in one word, I’ll say “cheesy.” It is so unrealistic that I couldn’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. The characters’ interactions are overly dramatic. The dialogues are so over the top that I ended up laughing at the supposed-to-be serious scenes.
We are supposed to empathize with such dialogues and characters. The characters themselves are unrelatable and flat, which could’ve been okay if the mystery were good. But that is not the case here. The main character, Zan, is completely useless in crisis. She starts doubting herself after looking at the pictures. She is pathetic and whiny at every stage of the story, she goes against her lawyer’s advice at every instance possible, and she just cannot stop talking about Bartley Longe, her supposed-to-be archenemy. It’s like she is incapable of growing up. The rest of the characters are equally unrealistic, who spend too much time thinking about too many things. We also have one potential client, who for some unknown reason falls for Zan and completely believes her for no reason whatsoever.
The reveal at the end was anticlimactic at best. I didn’t even care who the actual kidnapper was, and the way it ended was like the author just decided at the end “this is the kidnapper, so let me just somehow fit this in.” When you come to the end, you realize how much of a waste the entire plot was. The kidnapper didn’t even need to go to so much length. Readers may also feel cheated because when you use a POV format, you cannot have the actual kidnapper wonder what happened to the kid.
All in all, this was just plain stupid.
I feel bad bashing this book so much, from an author whom many people love, but I just wasted a week on this book and I want to rant.
My rating: ★☆☆☆☆
P.S. Are the reviews at the end of the book even real? What’s with this one by New York Times?
Did someone actually get scared after reading this book? Were they being sarcastic? So many questions…
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