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telthor 's review for:
The Devil and the Dark Water
by Stuart Turton
3.5, and I should probably round up to four but. Mmmmmmmmm, I liked it so much to start but the last...seventy pages or so? Intensely dull and pointless.
Maybe review to come if I stop feeling so blandly disappointed by how it wrapped up after how beautifully mesmerizing the majority of it was.
~*~*~*~
Okay, so. Like. You've read A Series of Unfortunate Events, right? All the way to the end. Literally, to The End. Were you one of the people like me who felt kinda let down and disappointed by it? Like, shipwrecks and secrets and long speeches about morality and all maybe wasn't your favorite thing after all the scary exciting compelling prior plot?
The last 70 pages of Devil and the Dark Water are incredibly disappointing and incredibly dull to me. In the interest of plot twist revelation after plot twist revelation, the intrigue falls entirely flat, and characters feel like they're parroting monologues to convey all the information they have to in order for the plot to make a shred of sense. I know, it's a Holmes book, he's supposed to explain the answer at the end. But surely it could have been more organic than this; it's Holmes inspired, it's its own beast, it could have been so much smoother in the end. I was struggling to remember who was doing what at any given point (which may have been my own fault, to be fully fair: in the time of The Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour my attention span is that of an ill bunny rabbit).
The things this book does well are abundant. The sailing is tremendously fun (if not very wrong; please don't expect Master and Commander levels of boat accuracy, which Turton even admits in the author note at the end). The mystery itself is joyfully interesting, with the reader debating back and forth on if it's really a demon or if it's human, and who might the culprit really be? And which crimes are most important and how they dovetail back and forth?
And, true enough, I didn't actually sleuth out who it was in advance--all the red herrings are marvelously good red herrings and all the true hints about what's happening are really marvelously well hidden. So, like, that's cool.
I love the characters to pieces, mostly. I love Arent's grumptastic bulk (and, yes, Turton, you may have indeed created a sexy Agent 47 lookin' dude even if that wasn't your intention). Drecht is an asshole (even tho I have a hard time reconciling the last 70 pages about him with the prior details) but I enjoyed reading about him. Sara is sweet and sassy and sharp. The few named people running the ship are all well defined and interesting. Sammy isn't in the book nearly enough.
The plot itself, remarkably engaging. Great elevator pitch. Everyone who asked what I was reading walked away looking interested once I summed up the basics.
But it just goes on and on and on and onnnnn and the last 70 pages, as mentioned, are such a flat turnaround into another book, and not a very good one at that, that the final flavor the book leaves is mediocre and disappointed, and that casts a pall over the rest of the enjoyment I took from it.
So, much as I want to give it 4 stars for the fun I had until the end, the end is just so dreary and disinterested and infodumpy and boring that the fun memories I had were slammed, and that makes it harder to want to recommend.
Maybe review to come if I stop feeling so blandly disappointed by how it wrapped up after how beautifully mesmerizing the majority of it was.
~*~*~*~
Okay, so. Like. You've read A Series of Unfortunate Events, right? All the way to the end. Literally, to The End. Were you one of the people like me who felt kinda let down and disappointed by it? Like, shipwrecks and secrets and long speeches about morality and all maybe wasn't your favorite thing after all the scary exciting compelling prior plot?
The last 70 pages of Devil and the Dark Water are incredibly disappointing and incredibly dull to me. In the interest of plot twist revelation after plot twist revelation, the intrigue falls entirely flat, and characters feel like they're parroting monologues to convey all the information they have to in order for the plot to make a shred of sense. I know, it's a Holmes book, he's supposed to explain the answer at the end. But surely it could have been more organic than this; it's Holmes inspired, it's its own beast, it could have been so much smoother in the end. I was struggling to remember who was doing what at any given point (which may have been my own fault, to be fully fair: in the time of The Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour my attention span is that of an ill bunny rabbit).
The things this book does well are abundant. The sailing is tremendously fun (if not very wrong; please don't expect Master and Commander levels of boat accuracy, which Turton even admits in the author note at the end). The mystery itself is joyfully interesting, with the reader debating back and forth on if it's really a demon or if it's human, and who might the culprit really be? And which crimes are most important and how they dovetail back and forth?
And, true enough, I didn't actually sleuth out who it was in advance--all the red herrings are marvelously good red herrings and all the true hints about what's happening are really marvelously well hidden. So, like, that's cool.
I love the characters to pieces, mostly. I love Arent's grumptastic bulk (and, yes, Turton, you may have indeed created a sexy Agent 47 lookin' dude even if that wasn't your intention). Drecht is an asshole (even tho I have a hard time reconciling the last 70 pages about him with the prior details) but I enjoyed reading about him. Sara is sweet and sassy and sharp. The few named people running the ship are all well defined and interesting. Sammy isn't in the book nearly enough.
The plot itself, remarkably engaging. Great elevator pitch. Everyone who asked what I was reading walked away looking interested once I summed up the basics.
But it just goes on and on and on and onnnnn and the last 70 pages, as mentioned, are such a flat turnaround into another book, and not a very good one at that, that the final flavor the book leaves is mediocre and disappointed, and that casts a pall over the rest of the enjoyment I took from it.
So, much as I want to give it 4 stars for the fun I had until the end, the end is just so dreary and disinterested and infodumpy and boring that the fun memories I had were slammed, and that makes it harder to want to recommend.