Reviews

When a character will wax on and on about this terrible past of theirs to an extreme extent, but then you know that you’re not gonna get the backstory for quite some time, it’s wildly irritating.

I’ve discovered that I REALLY dislike hindsight thoughts in narration. It takes away a lot of the building tension and mystery for me.

Has the story with a story device as the screenplay of the movie they’re filming is interspersed with the regular narrative. Very Meta and aware of the meta-ness. It’s a story within a screenplay within another story.

I honestly like the screenplay storyline MORE than Adele’s for the first half of the book.

It did really well at conveying the mental tension and stress at the isolation in a dark wood.

999 hanging up on her stretched ALL CREDULITY

Finally getting the backstory but it felt very meh. I feel like the way it was told actually slowed the momentum of the story rather than help.

I hated how much Adele didn’t trust her own mind. I hated that she trust everyone but herself but that highlights how aggravating and confusing everything must have been for her as a character.

It kept having reveals that felt overly obvious only for a new reveal a few minutes later to completely change what you thought you knew.

billymac1962's review against another edition

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2.0

Let me preface this review by saying I'm a big fan of Catherine Ryan Howard. All of her novels have been great entertainment for me, particularly her debut, Distress Signals.
What I like so much about her is that she tries something totally different with each novel, and all of them have believable resolutions without resorting to ridiculous twists.

Unfortunately, Run Time didn't hit the mark for me as much. I really liked her concept, again, and for the first 40% or so I was very much enjoying reading her again.
Up until a particular scene that seemed to go on forever. From that point on I found her writing to become very redundant, rehashing old details over and over again, and the novel became very bloated to the point where the longer I went, the more I was prone to skim sentences. Towards the end I'm afraid I just didn't care where it was going and I just wanted to finish and move on to something else.

Ms Howard has set a pretty high bar for herself as far as I'm concerned, so it was inevitable that something will be a miss for me.
She has a new novel out now (which is why I read this now after having on my to-read list for months; I wanted to delay having read all of her works!), and Run Time has in no way tempered my enthusiasm for it. Of course for the same reason, I'll be holding off a while before reading it.

So yeah, a bit of a miss here for me, but her others are terrific.

thriller_mh's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

sylvermoon's review against another edition

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tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Too meta and contrived, but I still finished it.

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