Рецензия на книгу

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  Jocelyn_Phoenix13 февраля 2025 г.

  I did not like this book. It's not very thrilling, there isn't really any plot, and there's very little in it that's even slightly believable. Like, I don't need my thrillers to be absolutely realistic, but I at least hope for some believable character actions and motivations, and very few of those in this book are.

  The main villain is a disappointment. He's hardly there, he's written very vaguely, and he's not scary. He feels more like a plot device than a character. It is heavily implied that the girls were so scared and so thoroughly influenced by him that none of the dozens of girls ever tried to escape, even the one who got access to the outside world to train as a nurse. But there is nothing in the way he is written that shows a person capable of that.

  He also seems outright dumb sometimes, and it's not a good look for a villain who is supposedly smart enough to not be caught for over 30 years... "Oh no, my psycho son who used to torture the girls came into the garden with my permission and tortured again, how could it have happened?" "Why is my younger, kinder son appaled at the fact that I capture and rape and murder women?" It's just dumb.

  I liked the way the story is told: everything has already happened, and the FBI are talking to a victim who has something to hide but is gradually telling more or less the whole story. However, we find out the main concept pretty soon, and the rest is not that interesting - we get the girl's backstory that is largely irrelevant (some becomes more relevant with the final twist but the twist itself is awful and dumb) and descriptions of the girls' life in the garden.

  Speaking of which, the garden seems more like a sorority that a murderous villain's lair. The girls read, and dance, and play hide-and-seek, and stage plays, and pursue various hobbies... I guess there could have been a stark contrast between their scary reality and the simple mundane ways they are coping with it, but I did not get the contrast from this book, I only got the simple mundane stuff.

  I get that "show, don't tell" is not the same in books as in movies, but this book feels like there is a lot of telling and little showing. Like, Maya says "we were so afraid of him", but I don't see it. I don't know, maybe it's just me.

  Overall, almost everyone in this story seemed either dumb or psycho or both, a lot of things were glossed over with vague implausible explanations, if any, and the thrill just wasn't there for me.

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