A review by andreiasereia
Bloom by Delilah S. Dawson

3.0

I finally hit my reading goal for the year! Unfortunately, while I was so looking forward to this and excited that it would be my milestone read, this ended up falling a little flat to me. This has all the individual parts to make me love it - women, farming, crafting, mystery, potential cannibalism. (Come on, the synopsis on the back of the book is so obvious when it talks about "devouring".) Now, I'm not one to think that everything needs a twist out of left-field so that the viewer/reader can never predict what's going to happen. When I'm watching something I don't mind spoilers because my enjoyment is tied up in the craft of something regardless if I know what's going to happen. From the beginning I could guess where this was going but unfortunately there was no spark to it for me. It was pretty clear cut and dry. Maybe it's that media nowadays has kind of desensitised me to the hallmarks of the horror/mystery/thriller genres, that nothing really surprises me. Maybe it's that this was only 200 pages so there was only so much it could do. I don't know. I don't even know where I'm going with this. It was good but ultimately underwhelming. I think it's mostly my fault for being too aware all the time, I think if I could quiet my head a little bit and enjoy it a bit more mindlessly I would have liked it more. In the acknowledgements the author even says she was inspired by her and her daughter loving Hannibal but her daughter questioning why the hot serial killers were always men, and the author responding that they don't have to be. This is exactly what it felt like. What if it were Hannibal but with women instead, but with less room to deepen. Now that I'm thinking about it, I actually would have rather not have had the final chapter. I think it would have been a more intriguing ending if it had stopped before that quasi-epilogue.