Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - Final Girls

Reviews tagging 'Toxic relationship'

kaylokay_'s review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.75

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killmoore_'s review

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

3.5

Had me going there for a minute, bud. The twist got me.

Truly despicable characters, all of them, and a unreliable narrator trope that isn't exactly what it seems. This was fun, and while I don't normally like books that end all wrapped up with a bow, this one felt complete.

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chasingpages1's review

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

3.75

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ohyeahshebomb's review

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Diverse cast of characters? No

5.0

Definitely kept me guessing up until the very end! Successful first Riley Sager book and I was not disappointed! Riley's writing style was absolutely perfect for a gooey thriller such as this. IT felt like I was truly watching a movie. He did a great job of giving descriptive without outright telling you everything you needed to know. You had to piece it all together. And just because you know something in the beginning, doesn't mean it's exactly as it seems...

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mburnsides's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

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

4.0

Final Girls had a slow beginning and a quick end. Many reviews complained about the pacing throughout the book, but I think it adds to the chaos and unravelling of Quincy’s peaceful and put together life after Sam’s arrival. The pace picks up as Quincy begins to return the memories of her massacre and the anger and violence she’s hidden inside herself for a decade.

I felt like the twists and reveals were nicely paced and put together. There was enough suspicion threaded that I got the impression that people aren't who they were portrayed as and that Quincy’s memories might be wrong. But the final villain twist caught me completely off guard.

I liked the snippets of Quincy’s memories of the massacre spaced throughout the book until Sam’s reveal and the ending. Each memory lined up with current events in Quincy’s life, while keeping me interested in figuring out what actually happened and why everyone distrusted Quicny’s memory loss.

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violetbentbackwards1036's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

i would’ve given the a five star rating if it hadn’t been for the painfully slow beginning and the unbelievably perfect ending. i think it was just how mundane the first half of the book was, but when the plot actually picked up, everything happened so fast. the ending was also just really perfect. everything, and i mean everything, gets resolved. i also found it really weird how after quincy gets her memory back, we don’t get anything else about her mourning her friends? you’d think after having to relive watching her friends be slaughtered in front of her, there’d at least be something about her accepting what happened to everyone. i just found it kinda disappointing how quickly quincy moves on from everyone’s deaths, how there’s nothing else about the friend group. i wish we got to see more of the friend group, more about rodney, amy and betz.

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cait's review

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percys_panda_pillow_pet's review

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challenging dark mysterious tense fast-paced

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

3.25

At this point in time, Riley Sager is a popular thriller author online, having published several successful thrillers in the past few years. Final Girls is his first thriller, published in 2017. I picked up this book partially because of the author's name and partially because a friend of mine who is into 80's slasher really got me into horror and the concept of a final girl, the one who survives all the horrors of a single terrible night.

Sager's Final Girls isn't unique in wanting to explore the idea of the final girl further, of what it's like after everything. Previously, there was The Last Final Girl by Stephen Graham Jones in 2012 and later, in 2021, Grady Hendrix's The Final Girl Support Group. All of these books follow a similar storyline: there are these "final girls" who each survive what is by all accounts a massacre and then they are seemingly being killed off until the main character is left. This leaves the main character a "true" survivor, I suppose.

My problem with Sager's Final Girls isn't that there are other books like it, there are many ways to tell the same story after all. More so, I could tell Sager was still inexperienced at writing when it was published. While I appreciated the thematic nature of the past being told in the third person point of view and the present told in first person point of view, since the main character and narrator, Quincy, is unreliable due to her amnesia of the horrible night all her friends were killed; in the end, I found the switch in POV jarring to go between.

As well, I could tell Sager was inexperienced in writing women specifically. Quincy herself was very annoying, and constantly got in her own way. But there was not only a strange love triangle between her, her boyfriend Jeff, and Coop, the cop who saved her life, there were also strange homoerotic tones between Quincy and her female friends/acquaintances. I felt like the was supposed to be a commentary on sexuality perhaps, especially when it comes to final girls (Check out Dead Meat Podcast Episode 15: Final Girl on YouTube for more information about that), but so much of it flopped and came off as cringey.

I liked that Quincy was unreliable and I was intrigued by the complexity of several of the characters. However, they were often too unlikable for me to really invest in them fully, and I constantly found myself hating each and every one of them at different points in the book.

Overall, I personally think that maybe the concept of finals girls should be left to the movies, or perhaps women authors who may be able to understand the deeper fears that persist in today's society of violence against women.

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