Genre: Mystery and Thriller
Pages: 371
Rating: 3/5
“In my experience those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them”
I genuinely enjoy mystery and suspense filled book especially one that has murder written all over it. The ever-wondering thoughts across the walkway of your mind of “Who died?”, “Who killed who?”, or “who killed what?” keeps giving throughout the read of The Guest List and these questions start running through as early as the prologue. Also, I mean what could possibly go wrong when there are a couple of humans stuck together in the middle of somewhere. In my opinion, this is a classic tale of “someone or people are going to die.”
The whole story enjoys depth in the explanation of main characters and their various internal demons they failed to face. However, the story suffers from quite several issues that made me rather bored quickly. It is SLOW PACED. Yes, I boldened that for a reason. It took until pages 200 and something before a lot of things started coming together. Imagine 200 pages of random dialogues, petty drama, unrequired scenes between the humans on the island. Each “story” had this feeling that something really bad was going to happen, like a monster was going to appear and start eating people or the island was haunted and that sort of stuff but nothing happened. Nothing. It got exhausting after some point and I found myself skipping lines. Alas, I got to a point within the 250th page or so where the story started coming together, then I started flipping pages back to “where did this story start again?”. You can blame that on my lack of focus or sheer exhaustion.
When the book picked up, I was not surprised because all fingers were already pointing to it. The twists were fine. Just fine. There was a particular twist I got to and I rolled my eyes like “of course, what are the odds?”.
Characters
Sigh. I honestly think that the men characters had some depth, but they really read like spoilt men with money. When I mean spoilt, I mean like just stupid. Maybe it can be placed on the precipice that they were at a wedding, and they wanted to let loose and have fun however, still unlikeable. A lot of stuff could have been talked about like you know…grown ass men but no they remained children. I agree with Aoife (the wedding planner) on that.
Verdict
If you want something with a slow burn and several unnecessary or necessary dialogue, better still something to pass the time then this might be the book for you. The ending was not mind blowing so don’t expect to hold on to your seat for any support whatsoever.
According to Yun on Goodreads “It's just if you're going to build up an entire story on nothing but anticipation and petty drama, when it finally gets to the payoff, it better blow me away. And this just didn't”. And I couldn’t agree more.
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