Book Review of Unfaithful
A decent ending, a slow beginning, and a very unreliable narrator.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
This was one of those books that I curled up with under a blanket on my couch and read from start to finish in the course of an evening. And then, when I was done, I had to immediately turn to a new book because I was left unsatisfied.
Unfaithful is the first book that I have read by Natalie Barelli and to me it just kind of fell flat. We start out following Dr. Anna Sanchez as she goes about her day - getting her kids ready for school, going off to the college she teaches at (as a math professor), and trying to assist her 'brightest PhD candidate'. And then, as soon as we start to settle in to her routine, stuff hits the fan in the way that makes a suspense novel good. Problems with the PhD candidate, problems with her marriage, problems with her coworkers, all of its normal, kind of mundane, and easy to predict whats happening next.
And then it all starts to fall apart. Both Anna's world and the plot of the book. There's too much happening in the second half of the book, as if Barelli is trying to make up for the lack of events in the first half. The overcompensation, mixed with some awkwardly scripted conversations and a couple of dead bodies, makes the ending of the book a little hard to parse through.
It is fast paced, and easy to read (for the most part), but as a reader I found myself left wanting more. More suspense, less of Anna's manic thoughts, more June.
I did enjoy Barelli's narative style. First person, in this case, worked really well because we need Anna to be an unreliable narrator in order for the plot to make sense and it is really hard to be reliable when your entire world is falling apart around you. For all the ways the plot waivers, Anna's sense of self, or lack thereof, and the weird situations she finds herself in would not have worked had Barelli not sculpted a fascinatingly unreliable character for us to experience the story through. I do wish Anna was less whiny, but she was truly the shining star of the book as a good first-person narrator should be.
However, despite the stunningly fun narrator, Unfaithful fell short for me. The ending, while it did wrap everything up nicely, wasn't satisfying. Luis being the man he was didn't make a lot of sense, we saw weird snippets of the kids, and June deserved a lot better. And the attempted assault and sexual coercion in the book were NOT necessary. At all. And that was where I had to draw a hard line at not giving this book at least 3 full stars.
I received an advance reader copy of this book from Netgalley and Bookouture. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
Rating: 2.5/5 stars
This was one of those books that I curled up with under a blanket on my couch and read from start to finish in the course of an evening. And then, when I was done, I had to immediately turn to a new book because I was left unsatisfied.
Unfaithful is the first book that I have read by Natalie Barelli and to me it just kind of fell flat. We start out following Dr. Anna Sanchez as she goes about her day - getting her kids ready for school, going off to the college she teaches at (as a math professor), and trying to assist her 'brightest PhD candidate'. And then, as soon as we start to settle in to her routine, stuff hits the fan in the way that makes a suspense novel good. Problems with the PhD candidate, problems with her marriage, problems with her coworkers, all of its normal, kind of mundane, and easy to predict whats happening next.
And then it all starts to fall apart. Both Anna's world and the plot of the book. There's too much happening in the second half of the book, as if Barelli is trying to make up for the lack of events in the first half. The overcompensation, mixed with some awkwardly scripted conversations and a couple of dead bodies, makes the ending of the book a little hard to parse through.
It is fast paced, and easy to read (for the most part), but as a reader I found myself left wanting more. More suspense, less of Anna's manic thoughts, more June.
I did enjoy Barelli's narative style. First person, in this case, worked really well because we need Anna to be an unreliable narrator in order for the plot to make sense and it is really hard to be reliable when your entire world is falling apart around you. For all the ways the plot waivers, Anna's sense of self, or lack thereof, and the weird situations she finds herself in would not have worked had Barelli not sculpted a fascinatingly unreliable character for us to experience the story through. I do wish Anna was less whiny, but she was truly the shining star of the book as a good first-person narrator should be.
However, despite the stunningly fun narrator, Unfaithful fell short for me. The ending, while it did wrap everything up nicely, wasn't satisfying. Luis being the man he was didn't make a lot of sense, we saw weird snippets of the kids, and June deserved a lot better. And the attempted assault and sexual coercion in the book were NOT necessary. At all. And that was where I had to draw a hard line at not giving this book at least 3 full stars.
I received an advance reader copy of this book from Netgalley and Bookouture. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.
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