User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
A potentially interesting scenario here, though one rather overplayed and everywhere due to Covid, but the writing had me grating my teeth right from the start: 'they huddled and inspected like Caravaggio's Thomas and friends', 'his penis jerked itself towards the sun, a yoga salutation, bouncing, then stiff at the house's allure' - the prose is constantly over-written with a 'why use one word when you could use fifty?' attitude.
The narrative stance is like a third-person stream of consciousness, jumping in and out of people's heads and full of observations that are both unnecessary and articulated in try-hard style ('the phones worked on them like those bulbous flutes did on cobras', 'Rose was particularly susceptible to the tart charms of vinegar potato chips').
The tone of the writing feels like a jaunty comedy but possibly scary things happen (we don't quite know what has happened - or even whether something has) so the style and content feel like a surreal mismatch - where other reviewers have seen tension, I saw a screenplay with a sort of 'other people are hell' vibe. Everything about this book failed to work for me - and that yoga-practicing penis is my main takeaway!
Rating: really liked it
This book is the most low-key and vague thriller I’ve read and would therefore be best enjoyed by readers who like very scaled back horror that focuses less on action and more on subtle feelings of dread and uneasiness. The whole point of the book is that you don’t know what’s going on, and it’s the absence of knowledge that is meant to play into the tension and fear. The story personally didn’t strike me the same way, perhaps due to the meandering nature of the conversations between the characters, but I’m interested in seeing how the Netflix adaptation will tackle this.
Rating: really liked it
A white family is vacationing in the Hamptons when the black owners of the home they are renting show up. Together the families must figure out what’s going on, because something terrible is clearly happening. This is an exceptional examination of race and class and family and what the world looks like when it’s ending—not at all different from the world we are in now. Finely o served details throughout.
Rating: really liked it
Leave this Book Behind
Rating: really liked it
this was an odd one! idk reading it was a constant flip between "pls let this shit end" and "ok wowowowow mind blown"
Rating: really liked it
Get ready to watch this book’s adaptation on Netflix. Such an amazing team on the board: Homecoming and Mr. Robot’s director Sam Ismael and fabulous cast including Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts!!! I cannot wait !!!
Oh noooo!!!! This is smart, thrilling, riveting suspense and family drama but it’s not a great choice to read it during your quarantine and chill times because it’s claustrophobic, dark, suffocating, apocalyptic story.
Something going on outside and you gotta stay in your house to save yourself but maybe sometimes taking risk and leave the world behind, getting out of your shelter to see the things with your own eyes would be the best alternative!
The story terribly reminded me Jordan Peele’s “Us’: Family with two kids renting a vacation home and but another family appears at the door. Thankfully they are not their evil twins to come for replacing them like Us’ plot-line. This story is mostly psychology suspense, it is not a horror story!
It starts Amanda and Clay- a lovely couple wants to escape from their city life and rents a vacation home at Hamptons for reasonable price as weekend getaway with their two kids. Everything starts quite relaxing, entertaining, peaceful like the silence before the storm or happiness before the approaching disaster as like all those thriller movies’ beginning.
Suddenly they hear the banging on the door and meet with G.H. and Ruth, house’s real owners escaped from NY because of blackout and came to their second home to use their shelter. The internet, television, cell service are shut down as a proof of their story. So they let them in. Of course the thought balloons start to appear above your head: are these people really the real owner of the house? What the hell is happening outside? Is this the apocalypse? How long to families need to stay together and do they trust each other? Should they do that?
High tension, family drama, class-race differences mixed with uncertainty of their situation and growing claustrophobia and feeling trapped in one location.
I could really give this book 5 stars because of great plot-line. But the perplexing language style, complex vocabulary choices and the way of story-telling were a little exhausting and complex for me. It broke my concentration at few times. Ending was okay but it could be more surprising and shocking. Those facts lowered my points to 3.5 but I still rounded them up to 4 because the promising premise and high tension story-building were delightful. It was still exciting, heart throbbing page-turner.
Special thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins Publishers/Ecco for sharing this ARC with me in exchange my honest review.
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Rating: really liked it
This was a book I was very much looking forward to, considering all the positive hype it has received, and it's relevant subject matter, I could not wait to pick this one up. Unfortunately, this will go down as one of the biggest disappointments of 2020 for me in the book world... It just did not hit the mark . There was so much potential, and despite the explicit vulgarity and often annoying style, I thought it was still redeemable and could not wait to see how this came together at the end... And then it just didn't! It had one of the most unsatisfactory endings you could imagine in a book. It's like it almost ended in mid-thought, was that the intent?! I mean, I can assume what happens after this ends, but sometimes it just doesn't work leaving so many questions unanswered, and this was definitely a great example of that, for me anyway. I'm sure this book will be very polarizing and I might be more towards the minority in my opinion but I'm just not a fan of Alam's writing style, so this will probably be the only book of his I ever read. You win some, you lose some. Anyway, moving on to hopefully the next great read!
Rating: really liked it
Sometimes I am so in the minority with a book that I am starting to question whether I read the same book as everybody else. This is one of those cases (partly at least, because an abundance of DNF-reviews agrees with me). I did not get on with this. Maybe I should have called it quits when at 15% in, Alam had managed to reference the genitals of three of the four family members. Snark aside, I was very much the wrong reader for this – where other people read scenes as tense, I found them satirical – and I do not particularly like satire. I found the tone impossible to pin down and as such the reading experience was more frustrating than anything else. Additionally, there were mainly three things that did not work for me: uneven perspective, disdainful characterisation, and a lack of trust in the reader’s intelligence.
Alam chose a omniscient narrator for his story, flitting between his characters’ heads, often within the same paragraph. While this might have worked had the tone been different, here I found this led to a lack of tension and an immense amount of frustration on my end because he chose to keep things artificially hidden from the reader. I would have prefered the narration to be either closer to the two couples or further away, as it was, the sprinkled-in sentences about the outside world took the little bit of tension I felt completely away.
I do not mind unlikable characters (at all, especially when they are women) but I need to feel like the author cares for their characters. Here I felt like I could basically see Alam sneering at his characters and I found that approach unkind – and again leading to my lack of interest in what was going on. He is also weirdly focussed on genitalia in a way that I found frankly baffling – I do not know what purpose the masturbation and sex scenes played for the story and I would have rather not spent this much time reading about a teenager’s penis.
It felt like Alam did not trust his readers to understand subtext or character development. Everything is spelt out, excrutiatingly. So much that I started to wonder if something really obvious was flying over my head. By the time I finished this book, all goodwill I had towards this book based on the incredible premise was lost.
Content warnings: (view spoiler)
[ depiction of racism, vomit, loss of teeth, disease on unknown origin, alcohol abuse, spiders (hide spoiler)]I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The quotations are taken from an unfinished copy and are subject to change.
You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog.
Rating: really liked it
What the fuck did I pay money to read.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars
A middle-aged white couple and their two teenage children have their vacation at a luxurious, secluded Airbnb interrupted by a late night knock at the door. The black owners of the home are at the door with a story of a major unknown event that knocked out the power along the east coast.
Over the course of the next few days, tensions surface between the two families and fear is the overriding emotion. There is no cellphone, radio, or tv reception, leaving them totally cut off from the world with no idea what is happening beyond their four walls.
It is clear a cataclysmic event took place, and the third person omniscient point of view allows the reader brief glimpses into what is happening in the outside world. The lack of details and the unknown adds to the overriding sense of menace. (The same type of technique that made Bird Box so terrifying.)
The author give the reader a look into the thought processes of all involved, which reveals hidden biases. The underlying themes of age, class, race, and the blindness of modern life bubbles beneath the surface. I give credit to the author for respecting the intelligence of his readers by handling them all with a light touch, which makes more of an impact. The beginning chapters meanders along and what looks at first glance to be mundane filler, such as the vacationer’s grocery list, is very revealing, as is later made clear.
Atmospheric, character-driven, and thought-provoking, this is a literary mix of genres that totally worked. The writing is sharp and smart. My two complaints are worth overlooking: the occasional use of obscure words, and TMI with some personal details.
I read this book in two sittings, and when I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it. In fact, I finished it last week and I’m still thinking about it. The ending is not tied up in a neat bow, which will bother some readers, but I thought it was perfect and fitting. This won’t be for everyone, but it was certainly for me.
A Netflix movie, starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington, is in the works. I can totally see this story playing out on the screen.*I received a digital copy of this book via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
*Publication date 10/6/2020 by Ecco Press, HarperCollins
Rating: really liked it
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher of the book. Although the book is only 236 pages, it is still bloated. This should have been a 50-60 short story at most. The author constantly overwrites scenes that needn't be. It took 6 pages just for the couple to be invited into the house. The author goes on for one entire page listing food items that a character purchased. Is this really necessary? He describes scenes that have no bearing on the story whatsoever. These scenes could be totally deleted and it would not affect the narrative one bit. He is the type of author that uses big words when little ones would do.
The decisions that the characters make seem ridiculous given the circumstance that they find themselves in. (Spoiler Alert) There is a blackout and the teenagers are walking through the woods to see if their neighbors know anything. The story takes place on Eastern Long Island, a pretty desolate area, so they need to walk a bit before they come to a house. One of the kids doesn't bring his phone! He's walking through the woods at night during a blackout looking for help and he doesn't bring his phone? Really? They find a house then all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, they decide to turn back. What? Isn't this the MAIN reason you went out in the first place?
The entire book is like this. It was bloated, overwritten, meandering and disappointing.
Rating: really liked it
Prepare to be freaked the fuck out!!! Amanda and Clay along with their two teenage children head out to a luxurious vacation home in the Hamptons. They spend the day lounging poolside, eating, drinking, and enjoying each others company which is easy to do when the wi-fi is so spotty where they are. After enjoying a nice dinner and after the kids have turned into bed Amanda and Clay just want to relax after a glorious summer day of sunshine but then there is a knock on the door. This late in the evening? Who even knows they are there?
"There it was, undeniable: noise. A cough, a voice, a step, a hesitation, that uncatergorizable animal knowledge that there's another of the species nearby and the pause, pregnant, to see if they mean harm. There was a knock at the door. A knock at the door of this house, where no one knew they were, not even the global positioning system, this house near the ocean but also lost in farmland, this house of red brick painted white, the very material the smartest little piggy chose because it would keep them safest. There was a knock at the door." At the door are the homeowners, G.H. and Ruth, an older black couple. They have come from their home in the city due to a black out. They felt it would be safer here. Amanda and Clay are hesitant. These are strangers. They may not even be the homeowners but their need to be kind and compassionate to these older folks outweighs everything and so they let them in.
That's all I'm saying because everything after this is straight out of a pandemic nightmare.
"You told yourself you'd be attuned to a holocaust unfolding a world away, but you weren't. It was immaterial, thanks to distance. People weren't that connected to one another. Terrible things happened constantly and never prevented you from going out for ice cream or celebrating birthdays or going to movies or paying your taxes or fucking you wife or worrying about the mortgage." Holy hell this was good, good, good. And freaky. And intelligent - I used my dictionary quite a bit with this one but that's okay because I love learning new words. I will say the ending is abrupt and it looks like some readers aren't enjoying it but honestly I don't think that this author could have ended it in any other way. It's sometimes the not knowing that makes something truly scary. There are so many themes to discuss that this would make an excellent choice for book clubs. 5 *terrifying* stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Ecco for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.
Rating: really liked it
Audiobook.... read by Marin Ireland
“Love goes on after a bomb”....
And....
“All anyone really wanted was home and food”.....
....Sausage pasta, wine, Chardonnay, whiskey, carrots and hummus, eggs, cereal, chips, cokes, desserts, cakes, ice cream, donuts, cookies, salty goldfish crackers, hamburgers, hotdogs, orange slices, cheese & crackers, strawberries, zucchini, blueberries, yogurt, bread,, tuna, beans, cans of soup,
Sliced turkey, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, cakes, more vodka, more whiskey, more beer,more sweets....
Add cigarettes, board games, movies, electricity would be nice, cell phones with power connection, first aid, household & cleaning supplies... toilet paper, Advil, garbage bags, bleach, duct tape, laundry detergent.. etc.
I hope readers aren’t hungry when they read this HOT BUZZ thriller.... which borders on ‘horror’.... and completely ridiculous.
It’s definitely an addictive read....
even my husband joined in on the fun.... but he thought it was idiotic mind-f^~king wacky... yet he was interested enough to keep listening.
Paul and I both found many nonsensical sentences—and others that needed ‘fact-checking’ ...
For example - NPR doesn’t air X-rated podcasts that a 13 girl needs to be protected from....
but this book doesn’t get its hype from logic.
The best way to enjoy this book is hop on the ‘belief-suspension’ train... and enjoy the ride. ( or avoid it altogether is another solution)...
but once a reader begins, even if you’re rolling your eyes like crazy.... ( not only about the disasters themselves in the plot...but for lots of nonsensical writing). ...
which maybe is supposed to be part of the fun, too?/!/?
However...
....this is one of those addicting thriller-types with great premise potential which tried to be too many things.
Again, I’m not sure if it matters....
Readers are going to read this book whether they like it or don’t.
Thriller readers will be too curious about this one. I was too.
There’s definitely an audience for it and I’m not sorry I read it, but after the buzz dies down and I have a few conversations with my friends....
I’ll easily move on....
We come to know all six main characters - by name - quickly ( makes the readers feel smart and comforted)...
We even know the contractor’s name down the street, (readers will feel even smarter),
but we really never get to know any of the characters ‘well’.
Does it matter? Maybe not.
The world was ending so why not eat drink, dance, clean, and have sex...
Everything else is Cowboys and Indians.
It’s one GOOFY BOOK!!!
Thousands of deer, flamingos,
an unexplained sound....
four adults,
two children,
trust issues,
survival issues,
new friends ( ha),
pink vomit,
a nightmare vacation....
The author throws in a little of everything including the kitchen sink....
sex,
semen on the sheets,
cleaning,
drinking,
eating,
smoking,
mystery suspense,
*gross* graphic descriptions of a sick kid,
a missing kid,
a contractor,
racial issues,
lots of inner chatter,
and
unexplainable disaster happenings.
It’s a NUTTY BOOK!!!
but....
I took something away which I’ll be thinking about longer.
When Paul and I thought about having children, we thought about whether or not we felt we were in a position to do so financially and if we were ready....
But we really didn’t think much about what the world was going to be like for our daughters once they were grown.
I am now.... and it’s an unsettling thought.
Rating: really liked it
I don’t know how to talk about this book. It’s just so out of left field. I don’t even know if I
liked it.
But I’ll try to vaguely review it here, as just about everything that I want to say could be considered a spoiler. The biggest feeling I had while reading was one of tension. There’s something constantly bubbling underneath the surface and you’re never quite sure what it is. And that tension keeps building towards a climax, but it doesn’t ever seem to reach it. I’m left with more questions at the end than I have answers.
This is a character-driven story that is probably going to read differently for different people. For this reason I think it’d work better as a screenplay; there’s a few instances where it’s hard to figure out the author’s intent. I *will* say this is a book that hits you very distinctly after 9 months of quarantine than it would have otherwise. For the most part I liked the writing, but I know some are going to find it a little too descriptive.
My advice is to go into it blind. Stop reading about the plot and go in without expectations. At the very least, you’ll have a strong reaction by the end either way.
And for those unaware, there’s an adaption currently in the works that’s set to star Denzel Washington and Julia Roberts, which I’m positive is going to be
amazing.
*Thank you to Ecco Books & HarperCollins for an advance copy!**
For more book talk & reviews, follow me on Instagram at @elle_mentbooks!
Rating: really liked it
An interesting and provocative plot wasted over nonsensical, absurd writing. I could probably write a proper review, but I could also just copy-paste Merriam Webster’s definition of “pretentious” and call it a day (fret not though, for I shall provide you with evidence further down):
1: characterized by pretension: such as
a: making usually unjustified or excessive claims (as of value or standing)
b: expressive of affected, unwarranted, or exaggerated importance, worth, or statureSo, the aforementioned evidence. First, you have your nonsensical pretentiousness:
“The car was Clay’s domain, and he was lax enough that it accrued the talus of oats from granola bars bought in bulk […]”
“Three flamingos lifted out off the pool’s surface with a masculine flaunting of wings.”
“The air was that sweet cocktail of ocean breeze and happenstance, good for tomatoes and corn, but you thought you could also catch a note of luxury cars, fine art, those soft textiles rich people leave piled on their sofas.”
“It was a noise, but it was transformation. It was a noise, but it was a confirmation. Something had happened, something was happening, it was ongoing, the noise was confirmation even as the noise was mystery.”Then you have your weird sexual metaphors:
“The shadow of a young girl in flower; the bloodhound might find the metal beneath the whiff of entry-level cosmetics, the pubescent predilection for fake apples and cherries.”
“He could pick up her disapproval like sonar. It was like the swell that presaged an erection. They’d been married sixteen years.”
“Archie, long limbs and acute angles, barely convex chest sprouting brown twists at the pink nipples; Rose, curvy and jiggling, downy with baby hair, her polka-dot one-piece straining just so at the legs, pudendum in relief.” (By the way, this is a mother’s description of her teenage children)
“She flipped onto her stomach, the sheets warm from her body, so the transitive warmth against her vulva was that of her own body, and flopping around in the bed was an act of masturbation.”
“In the living room, Archie stuffed his feet into his Vans and used his tongue to contemplate the tender empty pockets in his gums. They were soft and pleasant, like the recesses of the human body his own was designed to fit into […]”All of this to say: don't waste your time.
