Rei

I wanted to like this book more. I was open to liking it when I started it. But I found it dragging on the further I got into it.

The writing style is heavily King-influenced, but wielded with less skill, nuance, and color. Great artists steal and all that, but best to do it one's own voice, I think.

The gender-stereotypes that constrict the plot are hackneyed and tired. I didn't care about the characters complaining about them because I found the characters hard to empathize with. A bunch of well-off, busybody white ladies who are oh-so bored with their suburban lives and listening to their idiotic husbands, but do it anyway with long-suffering sighs? Mind also, it's not just where these characters start out but where they stay in large part. Character growth is minimal and not very internalized.

Then there's a totally uneccessary years-long break in the action that only serves to bog the story down. It's supposed to be a second-act setback, but it seems like it sets the story all the way back to the first act, killing both the momentum and the main character's progress.

Finally, there's the way this book attempts to inject some awareness of race without actually facing toward racism and taking a look. These Southern white ladies are apparently far too polite for that. There is one Black character but she's not given anything more interesting to do than be a victim, a maid, and a quasi-magical Negro. In the final act of the story, she does all the hard work for the white women, literally cleans up after them, and then thanks them for their actions which are too little, too late. Woof.

All in all, I found this book disappointing and a bit tedious.

What a wonderful story! For fans of The Princess Bride and Tress of the Emerald Sea, this whimsical tale is will delight your inner child.

Sometimes you get a good story. Sometimes you get beautiful words. This book is one of those rare delights for a reader; a good story, beautifully written.

I kind of hate to give this book two stars because I wanted to like it, but what I liked about it didn't have room to develop because the book ended so abruptly. It almost seemed like I had somehow missed something, but no, it just wraps itself up suddenly with a few vague hand waves and that's it.

Shame, because the rest of the book seemed like a slow burn, building up an increasingly upsetting and unsatisfying world in which the main characters are quietly, desperately drowning. And just when you think the curtain is about to be pulled back on some sinister truth and we're really about to get cooking, it's like the book just kind of gives up on itself.

A hum shows up and essentially pats all the humans on the head and says “there, there” and the humans breathe a sigh of relief and then the book is over. I wish that were just an oversimplification I was making because I didn't like the book, but it's not. I did like the book, and that's a fairly accurate summary of the ending. I don't even know what to think.

This is a book about emotional, psychological and physical abuse in an intimate relationship, but it's NOT AT ALL trauma informed and demonstrates NO understanding of the underlying mechanics of abuse. Honestly, don't read this if you a survivor, as it's deeply problematic. In fact, just don't read it. If you want to understand a portrait of intimate abuse, especially in heterosexual relationships, read “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft. This book is so clueless that it's toxic.

I really want to stress that the implied messages in the book are incorrect and irresponsible to the point of being harmful.

No disrespect to the author, and writers can certainly write whatever they want as a work of fiction, but I'm shocked that Greer felt at all qualified to take on a topic with such deep and far-reaching cultural and societal implications while having no idea whatsoever what they were talking about.