Final Girls
By Riley Sager
Please don't bother with this one. I got this book through Book of the Month and was intrigued by the idea, but the author doesn't explore the idea of "final girls" and society's interest in beautiful young women as victims to a satisfying degree, and when he does, it's clumsy. The book is well paced and the twists are laid out often enough to keep you reading so I can understand why people like it. But the writing is overbearing and the final reveal is not satisfying. It's littered with clumsy, distracting, and irrelevant metaphors in each paragraph and a lot of them are not even appropriate. And the descriptions are repetitive. I get it, the main character's boyfriend is a public defender. That doesn't mean his life and everything about him is defined by it. The characters in this book don't act like real people or even act consistently at all, and the only likable one is one that we never meet (Lisa, whose death triggers the events of the book). To Sager's credit, that makes them all suspicious and leaves open a lot of possibilities which is what compelled me to keep reading, but that's ruined by the ending which is a real stretch. It was sort of nice to see that this book attempts to explore feminist themes, and at the end the women mostly come together and support each other through everything they've gone through. But that's undermined by the way we actually see them interact throughout the rest of the book. The more I think about this book the less I like it.
P.S. I have to say having read the book Iām suspicious of the (male) authorās decision to use a gender neutral pseudonym in writing a book about women
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