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mstewa02 's review for:
In the Woods
by Tana French
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I loathed this book, and if I believed in DNF, this would be on that list.
I absolutely loved The Searcher and was really looking forward to cracking into this series, but oh my god this was torture to get through. I think the best way to describe French’s writing style is that she drowns you with character development and sprinkles in some plot…but with this book, even with all the focus on development, the main character never improves! He’s pretty stagnant throughout, but the characters around him grow a lot. It was maddening to keep reading from the his perspective!
French weaves a good mystery, but for every 20 pages of mystery, you get 150 pages of semi-pointless character interactions. I was aware of that with The Searcher, but the main character was very likeable to me…not so much with In the Woods. The redeemable part of the story was Cassie Maddox. Her character made everything better…I might still give this series a shot because the next book is from her perspective, ugh we’ll see…
Edited note:
I just realized In the Woods was her first book and there’s 12 years between this one and The Searcher. Perhaps I really like the writer French has grown into and should view the earlier stuff through a different lens.
I absolutely loved The Searcher and was really looking forward to cracking into this series, but oh my god this was torture to get through. I think the best way to describe French’s writing style is that she drowns you with character development and sprinkles in some plot…but with this book, even with all the focus on development, the main character never improves! He’s pretty stagnant throughout, but the characters around him grow a lot. It was maddening to keep reading from the his perspective!
French weaves a good mystery, but for every 20 pages of mystery, you get 150 pages of semi-pointless character interactions. I was aware of that with The Searcher, but the main character was very likeable to me…not so much with In the Woods. The redeemable part of the story was Cassie Maddox. Her character made everything better…I might still give this series a shot because the next book is from her perspective, ugh we’ll see…
Edited note:
I just realized In the Woods was her first book and there’s 12 years between this one and The Searcher. Perhaps I really like the writer French has grown into and should view the earlier stuff through a different lens.