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samsbookworld 's review for:
Close Your Eyes and Count to 10
by Lisa Unger
adventurous
fast-paced
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
The set-up of this book was so good. I was really hooked in the beginning. However, this ended up being just one big mess.
First of all, why make a book about a survival game when the story itself ends up being barely about that? I was so hyped for the survival game! However, once the contestens landed on the island, the story just went into an entirely different direction, and the game was merely happening in the background, if at all. (The game was somehow barely a part of the book to a point where I started to question if there even was a came to begin with.)
Furthermore, the time skips were a total mess. We jumped around pointlessly, and suddenly, a chapter would be set in the past without us being informed of it. It was so bad at times that I felt like my chapters somehow ended up out of order. The unnecessary huge cast of characters made this just more confusing and messy. It didn't add any depth or complexity. 90% of the characters were pointless and did nothing but add confusion.
How do you even write a thriller with an abandoned island nature survival setting and manage to make it boring? Where was the tension? Where were the stakes? What even happened? And why did it just end abruptly the second we had some live threatening tension? I HATE how we just jumped to the future. Lisa Unger clearly didn't know how to get her characters out of that situation so she decided to just end the book there with a skip to the future were they talked in a podcast abiut how they're back to a normal life now. Lazy. Boring. Horrible written.
I'm convinced Lisa Unger was so confused by her own written mess that she just forgot to add a plottwist. There were so many threads and so many missing people, dead people. You could have done so much with the setup of this and she just didn't? There was no plot, no twist, no point. Missing people just randomly returned. Bad people simply admitted their crimes and that's it?!
I refuse to believe any editor ever looked over this.
First of all, why make a book about a survival game when the story itself ends up being barely about that? I was so hyped for the survival game! However, once the contestens landed on the island, the story just went into an entirely different direction, and the game was merely happening in the background, if at all. (The game was somehow barely a part of the book to a point where I started to question if there even was a came to begin with.)
Furthermore, the time skips were a total mess. We jumped around pointlessly, and suddenly, a chapter would be set in the past without us being informed of it. It was so bad at times that I felt like my chapters somehow ended up out of order. The unnecessary huge cast of characters made this just more confusing and messy. It didn't add any depth or complexity. 90% of the characters were pointless and did nothing but add confusion.
How do you even write a thriller with an abandoned island nature survival setting and manage to make it boring? Where was the tension? Where were the stakes? What even happened? And why did it just end abruptly the second we had some live threatening tension? I HATE how we just jumped to the future. Lisa Unger clearly didn't know how to get her characters out of that situation so she decided to just end the book there with a skip to the future were they talked in a podcast abiut how they're back to a normal life now. Lazy. Boring. Horrible written.
I'm convinced Lisa Unger was so confused by her own written mess that she just forgot to add a plottwist. There were so many threads and so many missing people, dead people. You could have done so much with the setup of this and she just didn't? There was no plot, no twist, no point. Missing people just randomly returned. Bad people simply admitted their crimes and that's it?!
I refuse to believe any editor ever looked over this.