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A review by bookph1le
Die for You by Lisa Unger
3.0
3.5 stars
This is the second Lisa Unger novel I've read, and I really like her style. There's a darkness and bleakness to her books that feels authentic, and her characters are complex and flawed, her books meticulous and careful in their details. Unlike a lot of the mass market thrillers I've read, her books have substance to them. She doesn't traffic in plot contrivances that feel like contrivances; instead, what happens in her books seems to rise organically from the characters and their motivations.
My big gripe about this book is that it's strangely structured. She switches perspectives a lot, but sometimes it's really hard to tell who's talking until you're a paragraph or two into a new chapter or into the new portion following the chapter break. I find this especially strange when she switches from one character to another in the space of a single chapter. Why not start a new chapter, make the transition from character to character obvious? It's not that her characters are hard to distinguish; they felt to me like they had distinct characteristics. It's that chapters and the sentences after chapter breaks are often generic, posting some big picture observation, and that makes it hard to figure out who's speaking until the person's name is mentioned a couple paragraphs in. Instead of leading with something like "she wondered about..." why not start off with "Linda wondered about..." and make it clear whose perspective we're reading?
I also occasionally got impatient with the structure because characters would suddenly leap back into the past at what seemed like inopportune moments, and while I don't feel the plot was contrived, per se, being catapulted back into the past just as something crucial was about to happen did sometimes feel contrived. And while I was invested in the characters and their stories, there were times when the plot seemed to meander and I wished they'd quit waxing poetic and get back to the matter at hand.
Still, all in all, I enjoyed this book. I enjoy that all of Unger's characters are flawed, that they sometimes do stupid things but have feasible reasons for doing those stupid things. I especially like her female characters because they feel so real. So many thriller authors stick to tropes for female characters, making them unreliable drunks or damaged goods, but Unger builds a lot of nuances into her characters and makes them distinct without falling back on those well-worn tropes. I can't say how much I appreciate that. Both Linda and Isabel have rough edges, but these feel like the kinds of rough edges human beings have, not the kind writers append to female characters to follow the trend of using unreliable and/or problematic female characters. That she's a female author probably contributes to her ability to avoid making her female characters stereotypical, but more importantly, she treats all her characters like human beings instead of types. I wish a lot of other authors did the same.
This definitely won't be my last Unger book.
This is the second Lisa Unger novel I've read, and I really like her style. There's a darkness and bleakness to her books that feels authentic, and her characters are complex and flawed, her books meticulous and careful in their details. Unlike a lot of the mass market thrillers I've read, her books have substance to them. She doesn't traffic in plot contrivances that feel like contrivances; instead, what happens in her books seems to rise organically from the characters and their motivations.
My big gripe about this book is that it's strangely structured. She switches perspectives a lot, but sometimes it's really hard to tell who's talking until you're a paragraph or two into a new chapter or into the new portion following the chapter break. I find this especially strange when she switches from one character to another in the space of a single chapter. Why not start a new chapter, make the transition from character to character obvious? It's not that her characters are hard to distinguish; they felt to me like they had distinct characteristics. It's that chapters and the sentences after chapter breaks are often generic, posting some big picture observation, and that makes it hard to figure out who's speaking until the person's name is mentioned a couple paragraphs in. Instead of leading with something like "she wondered about..." why not start off with "Linda wondered about..." and make it clear whose perspective we're reading?
I also occasionally got impatient with the structure because characters would suddenly leap back into the past at what seemed like inopportune moments, and while I don't feel the plot was contrived, per se, being catapulted back into the past just as something crucial was about to happen did sometimes feel contrived. And while I was invested in the characters and their stories, there were times when the plot seemed to meander and I wished they'd quit waxing poetic and get back to the matter at hand.
Still, all in all, I enjoyed this book. I enjoy that all of Unger's characters are flawed, that they sometimes do stupid things but have feasible reasons for doing those stupid things. I especially like her female characters because they feel so real. So many thriller authors stick to tropes for female characters, making them unreliable drunks or damaged goods, but Unger builds a lot of nuances into her characters and makes them distinct without falling back on those well-worn tropes. I can't say how much I appreciate that. Both Linda and Isabel have rough edges, but these feel like the kinds of rough edges human beings have, not the kind writers append to female characters to follow the trend of using unreliable and/or problematic female characters. That she's a female author probably contributes to her ability to avoid making her female characters stereotypical, but more importantly, she treats all her characters like human beings instead of types. I wish a lot of other authors did the same.
This definitely won't be my last Unger book.