A review by the_broadway_slasher
Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin

challenging dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I can’t believe it took me nearly 2 months to get through Cuckoo. 😅 It’s got a promising premise, some interesting characters and a lot of creep factor that never really pays off. Honestly, I think the biggest problem is the novel starts with a banger of a teaser and then just cuts to 200 pages of character exposition that only ever give you little peeks at the actual story. By the time we get to any action, we speed through it and then jump ahead 15 years to a finale that is a mess. Gretchen Felker-Martin tries to stick a landing for about 10 different characters that doesn’t feel earned or like it has sufficient space to breathe and develop. The last 100 pages had me feeling like I was reading through a pool of sludge. I wanted to like this novel so badly, as it definitely has a promising story but it was so hard to force myself to get through it. It was also hard to keep up with the logic of the Cuckoo? It didn’t seem to really follow any rules and so it took away from the impact of its design. Why is this monster chasing queer kids? Why does it have to take up the front of a conversion camp? Why do we witness it eat and kill heterosexual people too? It just doesn’t really follow any logic and characters all seem doomed based on their stupidity, more than their circumstances. 


Meh. 🤷🏽‍♂️ If you want a solid conversion camp horror novel go read Surrender Your Sons by Adam Sass.
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