A review by literarygoblin
Final Girls by Riley Sager

Did not finish book. Stopped at 50%.

 Unfortunately, February started out with a dud for me.

Final Girls has all the ingredients to make something that normally I’d really enjoy. It’s a thriller with characters that leave me speculating and an overarching plot idea that has so many opportunities for interesting moments. And yet, this book fell far below my expectations.

I had to force myself to get halfway through this book. I’d already determined somewhere around 100 pages that I’d try to get 50% through the book before casting judgments on it - I held out the hope that by 50%, the plot would pick up and that I’d like the characters more. I was so hopeful that something about this book would compel me to finish it. But I had to practically drag myself to finish the last couple of chapters I read before I gave up.

There’s just something unbearably boring about this book. The characters are so damned interesting and the story pacing left a lot to be desired. I feel as if Sager thought the drawn out narrative would build suspense and curiosity, but in my case it left me frustrated and entirely uninterested. It was disappointing that Sager didn’t seem to understand just how engaging an idea he came up with.

There were moments in which I saw what this book could have been, and that upsets me as well. Final Girls is a wealth of potential that was simply wasted. Because I decided I didn’t want to finish this book, I asked someone who’s also read it about the ending and the twists - having learned them, they’re really great ideas, but I just know that if I read them myself they would have fallen totally flat. I had such high hopes for this book and for Sager’s work, but for me Final Girls was an absolute failure.