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onecraftyreader 's review for:

Homecoming by Kate Morton
3.0

I would like to thank the Goodreads reviewer who provided the advice that allowed me to finish this book.

This is a dual-timeline book, following an old unresolved crime in South Australia and a modern-day journalist with family ties to the area who finds herself digging into the past. I really liked the South Australia setting, and the scenes set in the past timeline. But the modern timeline dragged, especially since much of the main character’s research involved reading passages from a tedious book-within-a-book. I mean pages and pages and pages of it!

This book was so interminably slow that I kept checking my percentage progress on my Kindle, like “surely something’s going to happen now?” But no.

Then I checked Goodreads reviews to see if anyone else felt the same. (Sometimes GR is useful!) And came upon this advice: “3 stars for the first 400 pages, 4 stars for the last 100.”

So after 200 pages in, I SKIPPED AHEAD to begin the last 100. (Does this count as finishing the book? IDK. Discuss.) I skipped 200 pages and didn’t miss much at all. That’s not a rave review of the content or the editing, which should have cut things down and tightened it up.

It was worth finishing - I’d figured out most of the resolution to the mystery, but there was one slight twist I hadn’t. But overall the execution of the story didn’t work for me.