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A review by lifeamongpages
If I Die Before I Wake by Emily Koch
3.0
Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for sending me this egalley in exchange for an honest review.
Finishing this book left me quite conflicted and it took me some time to sort through my feelings.
While reading this book I see-sawed between enjoying the book and being insanely frustrated with various aspects of it (characters/plot/pacing).
Overall it felt quite lack lustre, because we were missing large portions of the narrative and our narrator is unreliable and stuck in one room the entire book which makes the scope of the story very limited. It made it hard to progress and then there were such long stretches of time were not much happened... chapters really which should have been condensed because certain things were being repeated about his hospital stay that were quite unnecessary.
Also the ending... that probably made me the most unsure about my feelings towards the book, it was disappointing. I mean I saw one part of the twist coming, but not the identity of the doctor ... that was good, but then the final hallucination was just too much because by that point I wasn't sure what was real and what was hallucination and the fact his final moments were a hallucination kind of sucked.
But I would check out future books by Emily Koch, because she did set up some really good twists, just the execution and pacing needed some work.
Finishing this book left me quite conflicted and it took me some time to sort through my feelings.
While reading this book I see-sawed between enjoying the book and being insanely frustrated with various aspects of it (characters/plot/pacing).
Overall it felt quite lack lustre, because we were missing large portions of the narrative and our narrator is unreliable and stuck in one room the entire book which makes the scope of the story very limited. It made it hard to progress and then there were such long stretches of time were not much happened... chapters really which should have been condensed because certain things were being repeated about his hospital stay that were quite unnecessary.
Also the ending... that probably made me the most unsure about my feelings towards the book, it was disappointing. I mean I saw one part of the twist coming, but not the identity of the doctor ... that was good, but then the final hallucination was just too much because by that point I wasn't sure what was real and what was hallucination and the fact his final moments were a hallucination kind of sucked.
But I would check out future books by Emily Koch, because she did set up some really good twists, just the execution and pacing needed some work.