Our Kind of Cruelty

"Disturbingly fascinating "

"2.5⭐<br/><br/>My expectations for this book were really high - the blurb that takes up the entire back cover of the ARC is from Gillian Flynn, and she talks about it being nasty, disturbing, and chilling. These are key words for drawing me to a book, so I was very excited to read this one, and I had seen similar comments in other places.<br/><br/>Unfortunately, I did not feel the same way. If you read a lot of thrillers and/or horror, you may appreciate the story for what it is, but you aren't going to find the dark & twisty story you're looking for here. It had some unsettling parts, but I was expecting more. It's also a very slow burn, and I don't think the ending was much of a payoff. It didn't bring anything new to stalker-style books, and that's what I was hoping for.<br/><br/>It was a promising concept, but I just wasn't impressed with it. It did hold my interest enough to want to to see where it was going, and Araminta Hall writes well, but it just wasn't enough to sell me on this book. I would probably try another book from her, though."

"⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️"

"It was a decent psychological thriller, but i felt the court trial was completely unrealistic. The male main character definitely gave me the creeps tho and thoroughly ****** me off. The female main character was annoying in the way that she was ignoring and underestimating all the red flags the male main character was throwing right in her face."

"I forgot to add this book to my Currently Reading Shelf but the started and finished dates are only a little off. It only took me maybe two or three days with a few reading sessions to finish—it’s a fast read. I found the first two thirds of the book far more interesting than the last third. The unreliable narrator trick can be handled well or poorly—in this one, it was handled well. You were never really sure, from the very beginning, what to actually trust. The story is, therefore, unsettling as you try to sort out fantasy from real. <br/><br/>That being said, the last third of the book became a “message book,” and it lost interest for me. It went from being something that the reader was trusted and/or left to sort through to something where the “This is what you need to take from this book” is planted into the words of a new character introduced at the end. I don’t appreciate authors who don’t trust their readers. It feels like the author therefore doesn’t trust her own writing to make her message clear. At that point, I got a bit frustrated with the novel and simply sped through to finish it, as I could see where it was going pretty easily. It’s too bad, because had the author trusted me as a reader and left things far more ambiguous, I would have still gotten the message and perhaps even absorbed it better as it would have left me mentally gnawing on scenes for a lot longer. As it is now, I’ve finished the book, gotten the message, and will simply blithely move on. Please, authors, trust your readers! Trust your own writing! Allow us to be partners in the process of figuring out what to take from a book rather than feeling like you have to dumb it down for us."