contemporary Archives

Yzabel / April 29, 2020

Review: The Holdout

The Holdout by Graham Moore
My rating: ★★★★☆

Blurb:

One jury member changed the verdict. What if she was wrong?

It was the most sensational case of the decade.

Fifteen-year-old Jessica Silver, heiress to a billion-dollar fortune, vanishes on her way home from school. Her teacher, Bobby Nock, is the prime suspect. It’s an open and shut case for the prosecution, and a quick conviction seems all but guaranteed.

Until Maya Seale, a young woman on the jury, persuades the rest of the jurors to vote not guilty: a controversial decision that will change all of their lives forever.

Ten years later, one of the jurors is found dead, and Maya is the prime suspect.

The real killer could be any of the other ten jurors. Is Maya being forced to pay the price for her decision all those years ago?

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A mystery where the “detective” is not actually with the police, but a lawyer. Ten years before the beginning of the novel, Maya Seal was drafted as juror in a high-visibility abduction-possible-murder case where a guilty verdict seemed the obvious result… only Maya wasn’t convinced, and managed to bring the whole jury to vote not guilty.

I really enjoyed this novel. As the prime suspect in the murder, and after the controversy that followed the trial from 10 years ago, Maya is well aware that no one is going to cut her some slack—on the contrary!—and that if she doesn’t do something, she may very well be found guilty. And so, she embarks on her own investigation, trying to root out the truth from her former fellow jurors as well as from the previous trial’s defendant. And all along, things are never truly certain, for there are in fact two mysteries, not just one. Was that man actually guilty, or not? And, of course, who’s the culprit in the recent murder?

It’s difficult to write much about this novel, for fear of accidental spoilers, but I can at least say that overall, I liked the characters (they all had their good sides and their darker little secrets), and I found the pacing appropriate.

One thing that I deeply regretted, though: one of the chapters completely spoils the endings to several Agatha Christie novels. Yes, I know, I know, by now the whole world is supposed to have read them, but I guarantee this is not the case (so now, I need to wait a few more years until I forget the spoilers to read those Christie stories…). I don’t know why authors do that, but please don’t. Seriously, don’t. I’d have made it a 4* book, but this kind of stunt makes me feel obligated to dock a half star just on principle.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars.

Yzabel / December 5, 2019

Review: Hold Your Tongue

Hold Your Tongue by Deborah Masson
My rating: ★★★☆☆

Blurb:

A brutal murder.
A young woman’s body is discovered with horrifying injuries, a recent newspaper cutting pinned to her clothing.
A detective with everything to prove.
This is her only chance to redeem herself.
A serial killer with nothing to lose.
He’s waited years, and his reign of terror has only just begun . . .

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I think this is the very first novel set in Aberdeen that I read, which kind of surprises me, since I assume there are plenty of stories set in that city. Since I’ve never visited it either, I had absolutely no idea what it looks like, so I couldn’t rely on my own knowledge of it. We get a few streets’ names to place the action, but not so many that it becomes confusing, and what the city’s areas stand for (posh districts, less savoury places, and so on) is clear and presented concisely. It had a gritty side, and a sometimes stifling atmosphere that went well with the nature of the crime/murder mystery here. On the other hand, I have no idea if the real Aberdeen feels like this. I was under the impression that the setting here, while fitting, was perhaps more generic than anything else (it would’ve worked just as well in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham or Manchester).

“Hold Your Tongue” deals with DI Eve Hunter getting back to her job after a couple of harrowing events that left her and Sanders, a colleague, heavily wounded—and not only does she have to immediately investigate a series of gruesome murders, but a lot of people aren’t happy to see her back, including other police officers who hold her responsible for what happened to Sanders. While the novel is not entirely clear about the latter point in the first pages, it’s still obvious how much this is weighing on Eve, and her coming to terms with this (psychologically, emotionally and physically) is just as much part of the plot as the murders themselves.

The story comes with plenty of turns and red herrings. These included focusing on a suspect in spite of a lack of clues; gut feelings; and also chapters narrated from the point of view of the killer, spreading little clues here and there, but still vaguely enough as to not make the killer’s identity too obvious from the start—I got close to guessing who it was, but not too close either, which is good for me. At times, I found the characters perhaps too prone on jumping on certain clues or making certain mistakes because of how their own experiences influenced them (for instance, Eve and Ferguson’s strained relationship clearly doesn’t help them keep a straight head); this was partly understandable, and partly cast a shadow on them, in that it made them look less professional in such moments.

I liked that some of the tension gets resolved in this first volume in the series, but not other things (Eve’s origins and how they may colour her future take on life, or how the killer’s actions will weigh on her team in general). This was a good introduction to Eve and her partners, hinting at more depth—although I regret that one of those relationships just can’t be exploited anymore, or not directly, in the following novels.

Conclusion: 3.5 stars. As a first story in a series, it sets the scene and characters well, with a partial resolution only, and therefore more left to explore later on. It was a bit slow in places, though, and could do with just a smidge of plot tightening. I’ll definitely be interested in book 2 no matter what.

Yzabel / November 19, 2019

Review: 17 Church Row

17 Church Row by James Carol
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

Three years ago, Ethan and Nikki Rhodes suffered a devastating loss. Their four-year-old daughter Grace was tragically killed when she ran from their garden into the path of a car. Ethan, a radio personality, escapes into work, while Nikki quits her job to care for their remaining child, Grace’s twin sister, Bella, who hasn’t spoken since that night.

Trying to give the family a fresh start, Ethan moves them to a revolutionary house designed by the world-famous architect, Catriona Fisher. For the Rhodes’, this is a life-changing move because a key feature of the house is the state of the art security system that allows them to be completely safe from the outside world within their own home.

But what if what they fear most is actually inside the house? What if 17 Church Row isn’t the safe haven that they think it is?

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A pretty interesting premise here: after the death of one of their twin daughters, Nikki and Ethan Rhodes decide to acquire a new revolutionary house, entirely automated and equipped with a virtual assistant named Alice. All this hoping for a new start, for a place where they won’t see memories of their dead daughter everywhere, and for their remaining child, Bella, to finally speak again.

The house itself, I admit, was both super exciting and a dreadful prospect for me. Exciting, because of all the technological gizmos and automation—a house that anticipates your needs, doesn’t that sound great? And at the same time, it -is- also scary, because if anything goes wrong, if the power goes down, well, you’re trapped in there, aren’t you? Which is—no surprise here—what kind of starts to happen, with a few glitches here and there that worry the Rhodes, just as much as they worry the architect of the house, though not for the same reasons.

The first part of the book was less interesting, to be honest, and I think that’s because it took its sweet time to establish the life of the Rhodes, the ‘slice of life’ moments needed for the reader to see how things are going inside the new house. In itself, that was indeed necessary, since how would we care about what happens next if things hadn’t been desperately “normal” before to offer some contrast? Yet at the same time, I didn’t really connect with the Rhodes, perhaps because their life in general, especially Nikki’s, was pretty much so sheltered that the rest of the world might have not existed at all. Wealthy family (they could afford a Tesla and buy 17 Church Row just like that—in London, so I guess they had an oil well stashed under their garden at some point or something?), with Ethan always out working and Nikki alone at home with her child. Bella doesn’t speak, and we don’t really get to know her, apart from her drawing and speaking through her tablet. There were only a few external elements, such as Sofia the cleaner. And while that highlighted Nikki’s isolation when it comes to what happens next, that still made for a sort of bland universe with which the characters could only interact in a bland way, too.

The second part was more interesting, yet also drawn-out and perhaps trying to enforce the point a little too much. Some parts of it were definitely in line with current possibilities and fears related to AI, and some others had moustache-twirling villain vibes that were quite odd here. The ending, too, felt rushed and unsatisfying.

Style-wise, one thing I found really jarring was the cuts between paragraphs. We’d have a paragraph about, say, Nikki thinking of her dead child, and then suddenly the last sentence of the paragraph was “She got up and went to make coffee.” (where I would definitely expect this to be the start of a new paragraph). I don’t know if it’s just me, but it happened regularly throughout the novel, and it felt strange.

Conclusion: Interesting ideas around the theme of artificial intelligence, but it was difficult to connect with (and care about) the characters.

Yzabel / September 1, 2019

Review: Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
My rating: ★★☆☆☆

Blurb:

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold…

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

This was a pleasant read overall, but I admit I found the writing style hard to get into, and that downplayed my enjoyment of it.

Perhaps it was the translation, in parts, but not only. For instance, I had trouble with more than one paragraph dealing with one idea, and then suddenly switching to an action that had been started in the previous paragraph—I felt like saying “either finish this action first, or put it in the next paragraph.” I don’t know if it’s just me, if I have a strange sense of how things go together? It was just jarring to me. The time travel rule quickly became redundant, too.

In general, I also felt that this would fare better as a movie. The four vignettes’ endings were all in all easy to foresee, the characters are fairly cookie-cutter and sometimes have exaggerated gestures, and when some of them have downplayed reactions (such as Nagare not really expressing his feelings), we don’t get privy to their internal life much either, so the writing medium didn’t really bring much in that regard either.

This said, as mentioned above, I still liked the story. It had a certain atmosphere, a ‘locked room’ feeling since the action only happened in the café, but not in an oppressive way—more like an intimate, slice-of-life moment, that had its own charm.

Yzabel / August 30, 2019

Review: Gone

Gone by Leona Deakin
My rating: 3/5

Blurb:

YOUR GIFT IS THE GAME.
DARE TO PLAY?

The police aren’t worried – it’s just a game. But the families are frantic. As psychologist and private detective Dr Augusta Bloom delves into the lives of the missing people, she finds something that binds them all.

And that something makes them very dangerous indeed.

As more disappearances are reported and new birthday cards uncovered, Dr Bloom races to unravel the mystery and find the missing people.

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

This mystery/thriller deal with psychologist Augusta Bloom and her partner Marcus Jameson, as both start investigating (first for personal reasons) the disappearances of four people, all after receiving a mysterious card on their birthday. A lot of the investigation rests on psychology rather than on typical clue analysis by the police, in that there are very few physical clues, and so Augusta tries to find out more by relying on what psychological profiling can tell her. Which in itself was pretty interesting, all the more after she develops her theory about who/what exactly the vanished people are.

The novel also makes use of contemporary internet, both when it comes to its strong points and to its weakness: one of the involved policemen goes to the deep web to look for clues, for instance, but it’s also clear that relying on social media to glean information is definitely a double-edged sword, since it allows other people (shady characters included) to get to know you.

Then there’s the setting—I always enjoy being able to relate to the places in a story, so with part of the action set in London (and the UK in general), that was good for me. And it was good, too, to see the investigation progress with both the ‘private eyes’ and the police working hand in hand, rather than have one try to hide information from the other.

It was a good story in general, but I admit I sometimes had trouble with the pace (in places, it was just a tad bit too slow) and with really connecting with the main characters. For reasons I won’t detail because Spoilers, Augusta was fairly aloof and emotionally remote, so it was difficult to empathise with her. I found Marcus, in spite of his past as an ex-MI6 agent, was too quick to trust certain people, which jarred with what I had expected of him. Finally, the ending was slightly too rushed, and too open as well—but then, I took this book as a standalone, so I guess that if it turns out not to be, then said open ending will not be a problem.

Yzabel / July 22, 2019

Review: The July Girls

The July Girls by Phoebe Locke
My rating: [user 4]

Blurb:

Every year, on the same night in July, a woman is taken from the streets of London; snatched by a killer who moves through the city like a ghost.

Addie has a secret. On the morning of her tenth birthday, four bombs were detonated across the capital. That night her dad came home covered in blood. She thought he was hurt in the attacks – but then her sister Jessie found a missing woman’s purse hidden in his room.

Jessie says they mustn’t tell. She says there’s nothing to worry about. But when she takes a job looking after the woman’s baby daughter, Addie starts to realise that her big sister doesn’t always tell her the whole story. And that the secrets they’re keeping may start costing lives…

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

Here’s a mystery about a killer, nicknamed “Magpie”, who every year, on July 7th, abducts and kills a woman. In this case, though, it’s not the police’s investigation we follow, but this story seen through the eyes of Abigail, a young girl born on July 7th as well: because on her 10th birthday, her father comes home covered in blood, and that’s when she starts questioning more and more what other secrets her family is hiding.

Just as much as a crime story—there is an investigation as well, after all—“The July Girls” is the story of a small family, specifically Addie and her big sister Jessie, who’s more a mother to her, since their mum has vanished abroad and never comes home. Their father is seldom around either, trying to make ends meet as an unlicensed cab driver, and it is clear from the beginning that Jessie loves Addie so much that she tries to shield her from basically everything, including their relatively bleak prospects in South London. And when things take a turn for the worst, we also get to see how the sisters’ life goes on, how Addie gets bullied at school because of her father, and how she tries to make sense of the events that unfolded until that point.

The novel spans about ten years in Addie’s life, which is good: it allows the readers to ‘see’ her voice mature, and her thoughts processes go from a girl’s to an adult’s. It’s also good in that it makes the killer’s arc into a slow-going investigation, as is definitely needed here, with the murders happening only once a year: if it had been solved in two years, it wouldn’t have been as suspenseful, for sure.

I kept guessing and guessing regarding who the killer might be, as there were a few valid options here. There were several twists and turns, and while a couple of them were slightly erring on the far-fetched side, I still found the novel as a whole a pretty good one, that kept me reading and interested until the end.

Yzabel / July 1, 2019

Review: Whisper Network

Whisper Network by Chandler Baker
My rating: [usr 3]

Blurb:

Sloane, Ardie, Grace, and Rosalita are four women who have worked at Truviv, Inc., for years. The sudden death of Truviv’s CEO means their boss, Ames, will likely take over the entire company. Ames is a complicated man, a man they’ve all known for a long time, a man who’s always been surrounded by…whispers. Whispers that have always been ignored by those in charge. But the world has changed, and the women are watching Ames’s latest promotion differently. This time, they’ve decided enough is enough.

Sloane and her colleagues set in motion a catastrophic shift within every floor and department of the Truviv offices. All four women’s lives—as women, colleagues, mothers, wives, friends, even adversaries—will change dramatically as a result.

“If only you had listened to us,” they tell us on page one, “none of this would have happened.”

Review:

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

I enjoyed this novel for its theme and its message, along with the format: interspersed with interviews gradually unveiling more of the “present time” plot, while the chapters themselves started some 2 months before and showed what led to this point. I guessed some things, I didn’t guess some others, and all in all, piecing things together was fun.

The topic at hand, of course, wasn’t fun. It balanced between office politics and double-standards—how female employees are (often) viewed vs. the “old boys club” feeling—, between deciding whether to complain about potential harassment or shut up for fear of retaliation, between wondering what does constitute harassment and whether or not one is “overreacting”, and let’s not forget also the usual “these women are lying and destroying lives” (funny enough, the people complaining about this don’t seem to react as often about how rapists are ruining lives as well). All well-made points, including the latter, because it -is- true they come forward right as the guy is poised to become the new CEO, in reaction to feeling suddenly even more threatened, but also one of opportunism… but not everyone would think about it this way, since there’d be lots of money involved as well. All uncomfortable topics, too, yet that need to be pointed at and discussed.

This said, I really had trouble empathising with the characters. I don’t have much in common with them for starters—apart, that is, from encounters with sexist douchebags and other run-ins involving the usual patriarchy-fed bull, although I’m aware I haven’t had it the worst either (fingers crossed). But I’m not a new mother, nor a single one, nor someone who cheated on a partner, etc., so I usually need a bit of extra connection with such characters, a little dose of something else, something more, to relate to their problems, especially their rich people problems, and… that didn’t really happen here. The impression I got out of the main female characters was more that they weren’t very pleasant people, who yet kept trying to justify their behaviours to themselves, a little like “but at least I do this better” and “but -I- am not like that, right?” Kind of weak in my opinion.

The story also dragged in parts, and even though I read it in 3 days, at times I wished it would get to the point faster. And I’m still unsure of who the narrator exactly was. The author? Not one of the characters, or at least, it doesn’t sound like it. (Their voices were quite similar, so I needed to see them named in each chapter anyway in order to quickly get who it was about.)

Conclusion: 3 stars. I did like the story, but never really connected with the characters.

Yzabel / June 11, 2019

Review: The Chalk Man

The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor
My rating: [usr 1.5]

Blurb:

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy little English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code; little chalk stick figures they leave for each other as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing will ever be the same.

In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he’s put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out his other friends got the same messages, they think it could be a prank … until one of them turns up dead. That’s when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.

Review:

[I originally received a copy of this book through Edelweiss, in exchange for an honest review. It just took me ages to get to it.]

Kinda OK in terms of the storyline, but this is one of the books that felt “I’m going to like it” in the beginning, and in fact… Well, no.

The 1986 parts were more striking in my opinion than the 2016 ones, perhaps because of the whole dynamics involving kids living their last summer before leaving childhood and becoming teenagers, drifting off from each other… only not completely, never completely, because of that one last tie, that one thing they discovered together and that filled them with horror.

From there, I was hoping that the 2016 arc would see them get together and come to grips with the “evil from the past”, so to speak, but… let’s be honest, that didn’t happen, not really, apart from a few scenes with Ed meeting his chums at the bar or taking the train to have coffee once with another of his former friends. So, the 2016 narrative plodded its way along and wasn’t the thrilling ride I had expected.

The mystery part has a few turns and twists, with Eddie’s dreams/visions blurring the boundary; he may or may not be affected by the same illness that took away his father; or having had an actual hand in the misdeeds committed; and while these plot points were somewhat of the expected kind, they still worked at the moment they happened. Still, I found that the beginnings of plots threads that I found exciting fell flat in the end, and rested on clichés clearly present to elicit some sensationalism (the casket, the dog, the character who gets blamed and commits suicide, the coat at the bottom of the wardrobe, etc.). It may have worked in other circumstances, other stories. Not here.

I had a beef, too, with the issues that were tackled throughout the story. The abortion clinic part was accurate enough—all it takes it to look at the daily news right now to see that the same hypocrisy about the whole “pro-life” movement is here and strong as ever—but the question of abuse (sexual and otherwise) was frankly not dealt with well. There’s one assault in particular that just gets dismissed as “it wasn’t so bad”, and seriously, are we still on about this? It is ALWAYS bad. And it doesn’t only happen to girls, or to people who “look like they deserve” it, or whatever other crap the rape culture continuously feed us.

The ending didn’t work for me either. When the actual culprit is revealed, it just feels like it’s coming out of nowhere, and is quite unbelievable. The way it looked to me, there were all those threads about hidden horrors that suddenly needed coming together, and so were tied at the last moment into something that didn’t make that much sense.

(Also, I may be mistaken because I haven’t read these books in 25 years or so, but quite a few scenes were reminiscent of older King novels, and I couldn’t tell whether it was simple homage, or pretty much the same scenes in a different writing style.)

Yzabel / June 3, 2019

Review: The Broken Girls

The Broken Girls by Simone St. James
My rating: [usr 2]

Blurb:

Vermont, 1950. There’s a place for the girls whom no one wants–the troublemakers, the illegitimate, the too smart for their own good. It’s called Idlewild Hall. And in the small town where it’s located, there are rumors that the boarding school is haunted. Four roommates bond over their whispered fears, their budding friendship blossoming–until one of them mysteriously disappears. . . .

Vermont, 2014. As much as she’s tried, journalist Fiona Sheridan cannot stop revisiting the events surrounding her older sister’s death. Twenty years ago, her body was found lying in the overgrown fields near the ruins of Idlewild Hall. And though her sister’s boyfriend was tried and convicted of murder, Fiona can’t shake the suspicion that something was never right about the case.

When Fiona discovers that Idlewild Hall is being restored by an anonymous benefactor, she decides to write a story about it. But a shocking discovery during the renovations will link the loss of her sister to secrets that were meant to stay hidden in the past–and a voice that won’t be silenced. . . .

Review:

[I originally got a copy through Edelweiss.]

“The Broken Girls” intertwines two storylines: that of four students at Idlewild Hall in 1950, and that, in 2014, of Fiona Sheridan, a journalist whose elder sister was found murdered twenty years ago—at Idlewild. As Fiona investigates the family who’s just bought the old school to refurbish it, haunted by what happened to her sister, the discovery of yet another body on these ground sends her into looking more and more into the past, and to unveil what happened to the girls.

The story was relatively gripping, but the 1950 part interested me much more, perhaps because reading about the girls and their friendship in a place where all the pupils were more or less rejected by their families: orphans with only remote relatives who didn’t want to bring them up, girls who witnessed something horrible, girls who were assaulted, or illegitimate daughters… Idlewild Hall had that reputation of “a school for girls who cause problems”, but a lot of those problems were the product of that time more than of the children themselves: people didn’t want to talk about the fruit of adultery, or about that girl who couldn’t speak after being traumatised, so they bundled them up to that boarding school to get rid of them. And through these different yet oddly similar stories, the bond that united the four friends developed into a really strong one, that was so easily felt throughout their chapters.

By contrast, Fiona’s story was more… conventional. A journalist with her relationships troubles, still trying to come up to grips with her sister’s murder, wanting to investigate the place of said murder, uncovering quite a few things that hadn’t been spoken of at the time… Not uninteresting per se, but not particularly exciting either.

In a way, I also felt that the 2014 arc tried to deal with too many things at the same time: was the murderer really the culprit, or was he set up; Deb’s murdered (almost every chapter); a ghost; corruption; the motives of the wealthy family who bought the Hall; tragic pasts dating back to World War II… Some of these weren’t fully exploited—the ghost subplot, for instance, felt like it was hovering between bona fide supernatural, and something with a completely mundane explanation, and in the end, the whole thing fell flat.

Conclusion: I would’ve liked this much more if it had been all about the girls in 1950, to be fair.

Yzabel / May 29, 2019

Review: The Farm

The Farm by Joanne Ramos
My rating: [usr 2.5]

Blurb:

Life is a lucrative business, as long as you play by the rules…

Ambitious businesswoman Mae Yu runs Golden Oaks – a luxury retreat transforming the fertility industry. There, women get the very best of everything: organic meals, fitness trainers, daily massages and big money. Provided they dedicate themselves to producing the perfect baby. For someone else.

Jane is a young immigrant in search of a better future. Stuck living in a cramped dorm with her baby daughter and her shrewd aunt Ate, she sees an unmissable chance to change her life. But at what cost?

Review:

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

At some point, this book was touted as a dystopia and somewhat compared to “The Handmaid’s Tale”, at least in certain blurbs I saw back then, but lest readers approach it thinking they’re going into a dystopian read: it is not (and expecting it to be would probably do it disservice). Or, at least, it’s not more dystopian than the world we currently live in, where you can get everything anyway if you’re wealthy enough (including surrogate mothers).

The story follows four characters: Jane, a naïve Filipina-American girl who gets roped into becoming a “Host” at Golden Oaks (the “Farm” from the title); Ate, her shrewd cousin who is intent on making money in order to take care of her family back in the Philippines; Mae, the Golden Oaks’ director, banking on this new lucrative business to secure her end-of-year bonus; and Reagan, a “Premium Host” who’s been wooed by Mae to carry the child of a billionaire woman from China.

One thing is to be said about Golden Oaks, for starters: it is incredibly believable—if such a place doesn’t already exist somewhere, surely it will exist at some point? A golden prison whose “inmates” submitted themselves voluntarily in exchange for fat money incentives and bonuses, it has a lot of advantages (healthy food, exercise, massages… all in all, quite “privileged” surroundings), but also clearly plays a part in the kind of exploitation that is already going on, when it comes to people (especially of immigrant backgrounds) who can’t be choosers when it comes to jobs.

While it’s not a clear-cut dystopia, the world of “The Farm” nevertheless deals with contemporary problems that do have a whiff of dystopia, namely class and exploitation. Mae and her people (her clients included) go about this with a complete dichotomy of recruiting the Hosts by showing Golden Oaks as a sort of luxury retreat and their role as surrogates as meaningful and contributing to the good in the world… and at the same time, the Hosts are given numbers (not to their faces), and discussed in terms of class and backgrounds. This why Reagan, for instance, is a Premium Host and chosen to carry a very special baby: she’s white, from a clearly upper-middle-class family, she majored cum laude from Duke University, and she’s pretty to boot. Clients can subscribe to different “packages”, and a Reagan will always have more worth than a Jane. At some point, Mae and her boss even discuss introducing a new level, that of impoverished white women from blue-collar families, as a sort of “Premium-at-a-discount”. In itself, it is positively disgusting, and capitalism pushed to a very visible extreme, without any shame. The whole thing is all the more disturbing that Mae’s narrative makes it appear as somewhat sensible: of course, the Hosts are well-compensated—although differently depending on whether they’re Premium or not…

This said, there were a few things that seriously bothered me here:

– The story is told in the third person and in the present tense. I’m not too keen on whole books written this way. It was tolerable, but I can only stomach that much. Probably a case of “it’s not the book, it’s me”, though.

– Jane is clearly of this brand of people who continuously make the worst decisions and choose the worst course of action at the worst moment possible (acknowledged in the novel itself, as Reagan reflects upon this). It makes for plot twists, sure, and it plays into the how the book indeed denounces the exploitation of immigrants, who don’t necessarily know all the “rules” when it comes to becoming part of their host country. Yet at the same time, it made Jane rather worthy of several eye rolls, and also sends some sort of underlying message that, well, she’s so naïve and stupid, so surely it’s her fault for getting into such situations. I’m always on the fence with such characters. I do not want to play the victim blaming game, because that’s rubbish, but it’s not so easy either to find her endearing rather than annoying.

– I’m still not sure of where the story wanted to go. There’s a looming thread of vaguely impending doom through the narrative, as if something really sinister is lurking, but that “something”, in the end, doesn’t materialise, or not the way you would expect. Whatever happens is mostly the product of short-sightedness on the part of the people involved (yes, Mae as well): because they don’t communicate properly, or because they fail to realise that continuously giving incentives to people and then taking them away at the last moment is NOT a good way of ensuring things will go smoothly. The situation unfolding in the last third or so is the result of one huge misunderstanding, and considering the degree of monitoring at Golden Oaks and Mae’s suppose shrewdness, it’s like several people just forgot their brains somewhere at some point. (Ate and her friends are not immune to that either, by the way.)

So, “The Farm” had an important message, but that message wasn’t delivered efficiently through storytelling, which muddled it.

– The characters are rather one-dimensional. Jane is the naïve immigrant who is constantly exploited. Mae is the exploiter and that’s all. Reagan is the typical woke girl struggling with her privilege but not realising that the good she wants to do may just be tainted. Lisa is kinda the resident sex addict and gossipmonger. Apart from these, I’m still not sure who exactly they are.

– The ending was… abrupt? The epilogue dragged a little, while the actual resolution, right before it, pretty much happened behind closed doors.

Conclusion: A good theme to tackle, and chilling when you realise that the way it’s presented makes it appear “sensible” while still underlining its inhuman aspects, so as a reader, you’re never left off the hook in that regard. On the other hand, I found it fell flat, and I never really connected with the characters.

P.S. Regarding the aforementioned comparison with “The Handmaid’s Tale”: publishing houses should stop doing that, because more often than not, it makes me wonder if the people writing those “comparison blurbs” have actually read the book(s) involved. Mostly the common point here is “surrogate mothers”, but “The Farm” never gets to THT’s horrifying level. Let’s be clear here: that’s not a fault of the novel, which is still interesting in its own ways. But I feel such comparisons do harm, since more than just one reader will pick the book because of this comparison, and consequently be disappointed.