Reviews with content warning for Suicidal thoughts - The Nesting

An okay premise poorly executed. This book was fine to read for a while, but it completely falls apart in the final act. The author was trying to do too many things at once and failed at all of them.

For instance, there's this idea of nature protecting itself and punishing those that damage it. A nokken, a nymph of Norwegian folklore, haunts this architect who polluted a river during one of his builds. However, not only is this monster not scary, but it doesn't make sense. The architect is the one who polluted the river, so why does the nokken kill his wife? Why haunt his kids and then suddenly try and kill the nanny who did absolutely nothing wrong? It felt simultaneously over and under used. The author mentioned it constantly, but it never did anything. It just stood there...menacingly! Which was creepy the first time and boring the sixth.

The author also threw a bunch of red herrings into the story at the very last second. The story had been building up at a steady pace, and then, out of nowhere, there are suddenly four new potential motives being thrown at us. There was little to no build-up to any of them. It felt extremely confusing and took me right out of the story. What's the point in investing in the novel and trying to figure out the mystery if the author starts dumping new information on you in the final act? You'd be better off breezing through and waiting to see who was left standing after the dust settled.

And believe me, when I say last minute red herring, I mean last minute. In the last TWENTY PAGES of the novel, the nokken reveals a secret power, which is that it can make people act on their base impulses. It turns out the diary of the architect's dead wife, which the protagonist had been reading for a large chunk of the book, had actually been forged by another character, who's motive was only revealed the chapter before. It was an attempt at a twist, but it was completely unsatisfying. It felt like the author changed her mind about the killer at the last second, and instead of going back and editing the story, she just crowbarred in some last minute justification.

I also hated the ending. It was so sappy, unrealistic, and and free of consequence it felt like it belonged in a Lifetime movie, not a horror novel. The main character gets away with literal identity fraud and gets to live with the family she lied her way into. It's ridiculous.

The only good thing I can say about the book is that I liked the main character. I found her story tense and exciting. There were real stakes surrounding her lie (until the end, anyway, but I digress). Her character wasn't well fleshed-out, but neither was anything else.

Overall, an underdeveloped and deeply unscary novel that was in desperate need of two or three more extensive edits.

Content Warnings