Despite being so short, this book was hard for me to finish. It was a lot of anxiety and not in a good way.
Basically, the story is about a woman who was driven from one terrible situation to another. Amy has a controlling and abusive husband. To get away from him, she goes on a cruise. The cruise ship sinks and Amy takes on the identity of another cruiser who looks like her, and is on her way to meet her long-lost family. To get away from the husband she had to lie and pretend to be the other woman for a while.
There's a bit more to the story at the end, and everything can be summed up in a few more sentences. This is the main reason why I didn't like the story. There's really not much substance to it if you can sum up the entire plot in a small paragraph. You can read the description of the book from the cover, and that will keep you updated until the middle of the book. Yes, I was keeping track.
The second reason that I didn't like the book was that the main character had no agency, so it was hard to sympathize with her. She knew her husband was controlling to a creepy level but she just wanted to make him happy? She didn't think about escaping until her mother presented her with the cruise. When the other person's mother mistakenly identified her, she just went along with it. When she had to tell the truth, it was because she was discovered. She was guilty of lying and had internal struggles, but it would never be enough to drive her into action. It was always her being placed into precarious situations, and she just goes along feeling things. She has no agency looking from the outside.
Finally, I hate one-dimensionally terrible female characters. They are so infuriatingly bad that it's worse than the pure evilness of the male abuser. The male abuser is manipulative, but he's logically enough work for his own interest. But the female abusers, they protect the male abuser wholeheartedly, for what? It's annoying to have so many characters who are just simply vicious. It speaks more about the author's own experiences than the story itself.
It was suspenseful but not very exciting.