honestly more of a 3/5 but i love alice feeney’s writing so much i physically can’t give her less than 4 stars. my fingers just won’t do it. however… what the hell was this book 😭

this review’s gonna be messy bc i’m in bed and i’m 12% conscious right now (pun intended) but here we go.

pros:

1. excellent writing as usual. alice feeney has always been incredible at creating so much mystery and tension with her words and narration, it floors me every time.

2. super unique and eery premise. the very concept of being stuck in your own body, aware of your surroundings but unable to fully trust your own senses and memories, vulnerable to the people around you, and fearing everyone is a suspect…. gives me chills. i love it.

3. another classic miss feeney unreliable narrator, she’s just so good at writing them and having me question every like i read because, if you haven’t guessed already, sometimes the main character lies.

4. i enjoy the parallel timelines or rather the switching from the present, past, and diary entries quite a lot  

cons:

1. it dragged. like a lot. near the last 80 pages i was just reading diagonally because i had had enough tbh. there’s only so much jerking around a reader can take before they slam the book down and yell “well what the fuck is the truth then AMBER?” 

2. while the premise is incredible and feeney does a pretty good job executing it for the most part, the very slow pace kind of kills it once you reach a certain point. again, pick up the speed, i beg you. 

3. the twist kinda left me ??? because it was a lot of twists all packed into the last 50 pages and i felt like i was watching a table tennis match but i can only hear the ball, not see it. i’m still pretty confused, especially with the open ending. maybe the protagonist lies too much because now i don’t even know what the hell happened 😭

4. besides the two main characters, everyone else is sort of mid, with the exception of an antagonist. like i wasn’t able to connect with anyone else and i think that’s important because if i need to suspect everyone, i should be able to get a good read on who the characters are. however a lot of them come off pretty one-dimensional.

5. i might be repeating myself here but there really was one too many twists and i’m not sure if i’m just misunderstanding it here, but i feel like the godmother twist makes little sense? that’s vague enough to not be a spoiler lmao. if anyone understood it better please explain 😭

all in all, not my favourite alice feeney book, but it did hook me and i was really invested throughout the novel, though i found the pacing way too slow and the explanations behind the plot a bit too convoluted.