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A review by billymac1962
Run Time by Catherine Ryan Howard
2.0
Let me preface this review by saying I'm a big fan of Catherine Ryan Howard. All of her novels have been great entertainment for me, particularly her debut, Distress Signals.
What I like so much about her is that she tries something totally different with each novel, and all of them have believable resolutions without resorting to ridiculous twists.
Unfortunately, Run Time didn't hit the mark for me as much. I really liked her concept, again, and for the first 40% or so I was very much enjoying reading her again.
Up until a particular scene that seemed to go on forever. From that point on I found her writing to become very redundant, rehashing old details over and over again, and the novel became very bloated to the point where the longer I went, the more I was prone to skim sentences. Towards the end I'm afraid I just didn't care where it was going and I just wanted to finish and move on to something else.
Ms Howard has set a pretty high bar for herself as far as I'm concerned, so it was inevitable that something will be a miss for me.
She has a new novel out now (which is why I read this now after having on my to-read list for months; I wanted to delay having read all of her works!), and Run Time has in no way tempered my enthusiasm for it. Of course for the same reason, I'll be holding off a while before reading it.
So yeah, a bit of a miss here for me, but her others are terrific.
What I like so much about her is that she tries something totally different with each novel, and all of them have believable resolutions without resorting to ridiculous twists.
Unfortunately, Run Time didn't hit the mark for me as much. I really liked her concept, again, and for the first 40% or so I was very much enjoying reading her again.
Up until a particular scene that seemed to go on forever. From that point on I found her writing to become very redundant, rehashing old details over and over again, and the novel became very bloated to the point where the longer I went, the more I was prone to skim sentences. Towards the end I'm afraid I just didn't care where it was going and I just wanted to finish and move on to something else.
Ms Howard has set a pretty high bar for herself as far as I'm concerned, so it was inevitable that something will be a miss for me.
She has a new novel out now (which is why I read this now after having on my to-read list for months; I wanted to delay having read all of her works!), and Run Time has in no way tempered my enthusiasm for it. Of course for the same reason, I'll be holding off a while before reading it.
So yeah, a bit of a miss here for me, but her others are terrific.