The Pool House

I think this may be my first two-star review this year, things had been going so well with my reading and then along came The Pool House to throw a spanner in the works and send me careening towards a reading slump. I should have known, I have become a fantasy girl at heart, avoiding contemporary fiction unless it comes with strong reviews but it was 20p in my local library book sale and I was drawn in by the cover.

Initially, it seemed this could be a good read, a story of Jem and her husband who take a share in a beach house in the Hamptons but when they get there they find out about a girl who drowned in the pool of the house a year before and died. Jem begins to investigate Alice's death and it incorporates all the inhabitants of the house. It should have been a fairly good read. So where did it all go wrong?

Firstly, in order to engage with the book, you need to really care about the character who has met their untimely demise. Alice, however, was ultimately really unlikeable. I could respect the fact she had come from a poor and difficult background and had overcome diversity but if you stripped that away she isn't a great person. She's shallow and motivated purely by status, she's a serial cheater moving from affair to affair behind her husbands back, she's prepared to blackmail her ‘friends' in order to get herself out of her own blackmail situation. I just couldn't get on board with her at all. I didn't empathise with her and so I really couldn't care about who killed her or why.

Jem, on the other side, was a much more rounded character to read from the perspective of and I liked how she portrayed the opposite of Alice, not really being on board with the expense of the beach house, having doubts about her own husbands fidelity and wanting to do the right thing by following up on what happened to Alice. It's just a real shame her parts of the book were at times slow and lacking in action. Overall this book felt unwieldy and by 330 pages in I couldn't do it anymore. I was losing the will to care and so I flicked to just before the end for a quick who-done-it reveal, found it didn't surprise me, it was what I guessed and so I gave up and am now moving on.

Disappointed with this one, it had lots of story potential but the characterisations let it down.