A review by alicebv1995
The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz

3.0

I have a lot of mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was an interesting set up and not something I had read before. I also thought it was very twisty and kept me guessing through most of it, which is important to me in a thriller. However the main character is absolutely insufferable. I couldn’t stand her perspective. Her relationship with Nathan and Sabrina went from 0 to 100 so fast and her possessiveness over people she’d just met felt very immature and unrealistic. Kelly, the FMC, is a million millennial woman tropes wrapped up in one obnoxious package, and there were multiple times where I almost DNFed the book because I couldn’t stand her perspective and didn’t want to keep reading. I’m glad I pushed through because the ending was wild, but I just couldn’t jive with Kelly. On a personal note, I think I’m just not ready for stories about the pandemic yet. They feel too close and too real still after the horrors of 2020, so I think I’ll be steering clear of books set during a COVID for a while.