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A review by hayleybeale
The Guilt Trip by Sandie Jones
2.0
Worst wedding ever! Rachel, her husband Jack, their friends Noah and Paige, are in Portugal for the wedding of Jack’s brother Will and his fiancée Ali. The six of them are staying in a luxy villa on the coast for a couple of days prior to the event.
The structure felt a lot like a Lucy Foley novel, but unfortunately without enough interesting characters to keep things moving along. Even a reader (or listener) who isn’t paying that much attention will be able to guess at least some of the secrets without too much trouble and then be annoyed that it takes so long to get there, or maybe that was just me.
We know right from the start, in the Prologue, that Something Happens and that these six characters are somehow involved. We then shift back a few days and live through the trip right from the start when ditzy Ally has apparently forgotten her passport.
It soon becomes clear that each of the six has a secret and this all come out over the course of the next few days. There are affairs and other entanglements, suspicions, and recriminations. Unfortunately there just isn’t enough plot to keep the novel moving at a decent pace - there is a lot of filler where our narrator, Rachel, speculates on various things and muses about what will happen if she does various other things and this just bogs the whole book down.
The narrator of the audiobook does a very good job of keeping all the characters separated with a range of different tones and accents (I thought her Ali was particularly and appropriately annoying) but even she seems to find the whole thing rather wearying as she starts yet another chapter in which nothing much happens.
This is a decent enough thriller but, frankly, there are so many others that are better that I wouldn’t bother.
Thanks to Macmillan and Netgalley for the digital review audiobook.
The structure felt a lot like a Lucy Foley novel, but unfortunately without enough interesting characters to keep things moving along. Even a reader (or listener) who isn’t paying that much attention will be able to guess at least some of the secrets without too much trouble and then be annoyed that it takes so long to get there, or maybe that was just me.
We know right from the start, in the Prologue, that Something Happens and that these six characters are somehow involved. We then shift back a few days and live through the trip right from the start when ditzy Ally has apparently forgotten her passport.
It soon becomes clear that each of the six has a secret and this all come out over the course of the next few days. There are affairs and other entanglements, suspicions, and recriminations. Unfortunately there just isn’t enough plot to keep the novel moving at a decent pace - there is a lot of filler where our narrator, Rachel, speculates on various things and muses about what will happen if she does various other things and this just bogs the whole book down.
The narrator of the audiobook does a very good job of keeping all the characters separated with a range of different tones and accents (I thought her Ali was particularly and appropriately annoying) but even she seems to find the whole thing rather wearying as she starts yet another chapter in which nothing much happens.
This is a decent enough thriller but, frankly, there are so many others that are better that I wouldn’t bother.
Thanks to Macmillan and Netgalley for the digital review audiobook.