After Anna

By Alex Lake

[A girl is missing. Five years old,

taken from outside her school.

She has vanished, traceless.

The police are at a loss; her parents are

beyond grief. Their daughter is lost

forever - perhaps dead,

perhaps enslaved.

But the biggest mystery is yet to

come: one week after she was abducted,

Anna is returned.

She has no memory of where she

has been. And this, for her mother,

is just the beginning of

the nightmare...]

I really wasn't impressed with this at all.

The plot was hella predictable the entire way through. Not to mention it kept contradicting itself along the way. 

At one moment Julia states her mother is in a nursing home, the next minute she states she's dead and then in a further chapter she goes and visits said dead mother in the nursing home, whaaaat?! It needed a bit more consistency if I'm being honest.

And further to that, I literally hated all of the main characters. They were so unlikeable it was annoying. The funny thing is they were relatable. Maybe that's what made them such annoying characters, I don't know. 

I can't pinpoint an exact reason why I didn't like Julia, she did the best she could in the circumstances thrown her way, I just didn't click with her. 

Brian and Edna though, I loathed. Brian because he was a spineless pushover letting his mother get exactly what she wanted and Edna because she was a manipulative old hag stuck in her old fashioned ways.

The only thing I did like was the perspective of the kidnapper's chapters. Using second person is always an interesting technique so it was a nice way to freshen up the book. The chapters for the main part were also set out pretty weirdly, in separate sections within each other. I don't know, I found it quite odd.

Maybe I just don't get on with these types of books. I'm never truly satisfied with whoever has supposedly committed the crime because, to me, it's always obvious who it is pretty early on.

📖

Big Little Lies

Moving is so stressful, like unbelievably stressful.

Part of me is so excited and loving packing my life into boxes and then unpacking in a brand new room. But the other part of me is terrified. Change is the worst, but also the best. Does that make sense?

I don't know. Anyway, last weekend I binge watched all 7 episodes of Big Little Lies because, well, why the hell not? I'd heard it was good and so I watched it all, in one go. Whoops.

Minor spoilers ahead.

With an all star cast and a murder mystery to be unravelled, what was not to love?

Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley are all fantastic in their roles as women with complicated lives. Madeline (Witherspoon) is your typical Queen Bee, rich and perfect, except she's been having an affair and her marriage is falling apart. Celeste (Kidman) is the beautiful, top shot ex-layer, with a doting husband and lovely twin boys, except her husband occasionally beats her. And Jane (Woodley) is an outcast running from a past she can't escape, new to town with accusations beginning to escalate.

Corr, the way the three of their storylines are so neatly interwoven with each other and with the interrogation scenes is wonderful. You literally don't know who has been murdered until the penultimate scene in the last episode. It all mounts more and more and more until realisation comes crashing down and you understand how it's all tied together. It's brilliant.

I have to mention Alexander Skarsgard as Perry, Celeste's abusive husband. He has a real knack for these kind of roles and I think he played the part perfectly. Santiago Cabrera as Joseph, Madeline's secret lover, also did a great job. It's so strange to go from watching Skarsgard in True Blood and Cabrera in The Musketeers to something like this, so normal but exciting because their characters are new and different from their previous ones. Laura Durn was also very passionate and kind of an irritating character but with good reason.

The only thing I was a little disappointed with was who was actually murdered. I felt that there were two individuals who it would have been pretty obvious to choose to murder and one of them was, in fact, the one that was murdered so it wasn't very shocking. It was good though how the events leading up to the murder unravelled. I literally did not see one of the revelations coming at all. It was such a good twist!!

I feel like I may have stumbled across a slight plot hole though, in the fact that when all of the protagonists are coming together in the murder scene, Joseph goes off to the 'bathroom' right after Madeline storms off - I presumed he was going after her yet he never appears again which I found a little odd.

Oh well, it was well worth the watch. The cinematography and the music were beautiful, the story gripping and the acting phenomenal.



✽

The Girl on the Train

Image from Pinterest

So, I really need to start packing, I've got a couple of items left in the fridge that need to be eaten and a few more things on the planner that needs watching.

Oh the woes of going home for Christmas.

Just kidding. Can't wait to be honest.

I watched this ages ago. Clearly, as it was out in October. Whoops.

I know I watched it literally a week or two after I'd listened to the audiobook.

Honestly, I was a little let down by the book. I felt everyone had hyped it up too much and it didn't live up to said hype.

But the film, the film did a cracking job of following the plot line of the book (bar one or two things).

The characters were on point. 

I almost loathed Rachel in the book but Emily Blunt played her so well. She was even gorgeous when she was meant to be a stinking hungover mess.

I hated Rebecca Ferguson's Anna and Justin Theroux's Tom as well, which is exactly how I felt about them in the book. Anna was so stuck up and paranoid, Tom an evil prick.

Funnily enough, again, I felt like I could empathise more with Megan. Haley Bennet did a great job of portraying her. She certainly doesn't have a nice or easy backstory, or, indeed, a nice story altogether.

To be honest, the only character I wasn't completely sold on was Luke Evans's Scott. I don't know what it was but I just couldn't connect with the character. In the book he has quite a mean side but could make you feel sorry for him too. I didn't feel any of that whilst watching Luke Evans portrayal. A shame really because I think he's great as an actor.

The setting - obvious no no as it was changed from London - was actually alright set in New York. I still got the same feeling as before - the long commute, rural villages on the outskirts of a big city, blah blah blah.

There were also a few minor changes in Rachel and Scott's interactions but I didn't think anything of these really.

The cinematography was beautiful, the sudden cuts to close-ups magnifying and lovely.

Overall, I think the directors and producers and cast did a fantastic job.

Even though I knew the ending it still had me sat on the edge of my seat waiting for it.

Worth a watch if you're up for a murder mystery riddled with twists and turns, but not one I feel I would need to watch again.

---

Rating:
★★★★☆

The Girl on the Train

By Paula Hawkins.

Narrated by Clare Corbett, India Fisher and Louise Brealey.

I've timed this perfectly as the film was released just a few days ago, muhahaha.

All coincidence of course.

Image From Goodreads

[The debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives.

EVERY DAY THE SAME Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows them. Jess and Jason, she calls them. Their life - as she sees it - is perfect. Not unlike the life she recently lost.

UNTIL TODAY And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. But is she really as unreliable as they say? Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?]

I'm kind of a little bit disappointed with this.

Like, I don't even know if I really enjoyed it or not. I feel like I should like it more because it was so well-received by everyone else.

I started off enjoying it. I was gripped and curious for the most part.

I love the way Hawkins created really detailed characters, realistic ones at that. 

The details - or lack there of - for Rachel's alcoholic tendencies and her blackouts helped add to the whole mystery.

Although, I loathed both her and Anna pretty much throughout the entire thing - even their voices got on my nerves, so a well placed voice cast I'll have to admit. 

They were both such horrible types of people.

But I can't pinpoint exactly what made me lose my enjoyment out of it in the end. 

I just know that once I'd twigged who the killer was, I didn't care for the rest of the novel.

I liked Megan's character and her backstory, it was heartbreaking and horrible. 

Plus, there was the twist with who the killer actually was, but, yeah, I felt we found out too early somehow.

Meh, I don't know, mediocre at best.

I am looking forward to the film version though, it looks brilliant and from what I've seen of the trailer Emily Blunt looks like she'll nail the character of Rachel.

✌︎

Black-Eyed Susan's

By Julia Heaberlin

I know this is another review and I promised other content on Sunday's but they're all still a work in progress. This week's just been kinda hectic and I find reviews easier to whip up than the others which tend to need a tiny bit of planning. 

Sorry!

[I am the star of screaming tabloid headlines and campfire ghost stories. I am one of the four Black-Eyed Susan's. The lucky one. 

Left with three other girls in a grave shrouded by black-eyed Susan's, Tessa alone survived, her testimony helping to put a killer behind bars. 

Now, sixteen years later, he is about to be executed. But Tessa feels no relief. Because someone is planting black-eyed Susan's outside her window. Someone is sending her daughter sinister messages. And there's a lawyer telling her the man about to be put to death is innocent. 

Which can mean only one thing: the wrong man has been sentenced, the real killer is still out there and Tessa might not be the last Black-Eyed Susan...]

I was recommended this book by a colleague at work as I was looking for something that wasn't my usual YA or fantasy fiction and a murder mystery was definitely something I needed.

It kept me hooked all the way through. At one point, I thought it would even be one of those books where you didn't find out who the real killer was, which would have been really frustrating- that's how close to the end they left the reveal!

But, the main thing, the thing I am really happy about is that I actually guessed who the murderer was, a few chapters before the end too, and I was right! I'm never right, I always get so absorbed in the story that I never like to jump to conclusions about who it might be (in films anyway), but for some reason in this, I just knew.

Dramatic. Beautiful imagery. Great characters with lots of flaws and depth to them. Told very well, flipping back and forth between past and present (got a little confusing at times), but it really came into its own at the end, letting us - and Tessa - find out who the murderer was simultaneously, but through different methods.

Brilliant.

The only thing is, it never really explained how the serial killer came to pick Tessa or why he did it. The bits afterwards make sense with them hiding in plain sight and the whole deal with Lydia, but it never really covered the whole before bit which left a few questions pinging in my head that are never going to be answered.

Oh well, I guess you can't win them all! Still a great read.



✌