Follow-up to Nine Liars, and the sixth book in a loose series.
I’ve been looking forward to this one for almost four years now. Nine Liars ended on a major cliffhanger. Tbh, by the time this one released, I’d mostly forgotten the previous book. I remembered the original trilogy well, and then the bridge book pretty well, but the new series didn’t really stick in my head. Because of that, I mostly went into this blind, just knowing that the characters would be familiar.
Two unpleasant surprises met me when I started this audiobook. First, the narrator had changed, when it had been consistent for the last five books. That’s not necessarily bad, just unexpected and threw me off. Second, the prologue began with a character on some sort of hallucinogenic mushroom. I really don’t like books about drugs or books that take me into the mental headspace of characters while on drugs. If this wasn’t part of a series I’d already invested a lot of time into, I would have immediately stopped reading. And honestly, I wish I had.
The story was split between two narratives: a murder mystery from the 70s involving a commune/cult, and the present day, where narrator Stevie is trying to figure out life again after her boyfriend dumped her and she found him kissing some random girl. The murder mystery was fine – again, except that I could have done without all the drug use – but the present day story just drove me insane. Stevie pines and pines and pines for this asshole who is the worst kind of person, while her best friends are telling her to let the ass go and not give him another chance if he comes crawling back.
The rest of this review will contain spoilers, so click away now if you don’t want to know.
As much as I disliked Stevie’s whining, once David did show up again and beg forgiveness, I appreciated that she considered, interrogated him, and then chose to not take him back. She decided to go her own way. That was great. And then we get to the last chapter, where out of the blue, she goes to town, meets up with him, tells him that she’s giving up her life’s dream (supposedly because it’s no longer her dream, but she also asks him if that makes her less intimidating, which is why he broke up with her in the first place), and then they kiss and make up and are back together again. The entire last chapter felt completely unrelated to the rest of the story, like Johnson was telling a story about standing up for yourself, and instead was told by the publisher that she needed to make sure the romance ended well, so she tacked this post-script on. It was especially ironic that Stevie goes back to the asshole in a story that centered on a man who was brainwashing younger women to follow him.
I wanted to throw the book across the room. Only I was listening to an audiobook, so I wasn’t going to throw my phone across the room. I’m sure there will be plenty of readers who find the ending romantic, and maybe this is just because I’m old and have done a lot of work in de-centering men, but this story was just a big fat nope.
Performance: The audiobook was read by Emily Ellet. I could not tell you anything about the quality of her performance because all of these characters already had voices for me from the previous narrator, and I think it would be very unfair to make a comparison.
