Link to buy Darkness Follows
Story Rating: 2 out of 5
Blurb:
What if the hiding spot you escape to becomes more dangerous than the place you ran from?
Aurina Patrick is an ambitious young woman, whose only mistake was letting someone get too close. The day she is brought into the police department for questioning, her life changes forever. When Aurina discovers that someone she trusts has involved her in a series of murder investigations, her sister Ryanne joins her in a search for the truth. As the situation unravels, the Patrick sisters realize their lives could be in jeopardy.
When the sisters are taken to a remote location, the struggle for safety truly begins.
Review:
This book makes me feel bad for not
liking it. I really, really wanted to like it but was unable to. Part of this was due to the absolutely
horrible editing job – until I finished the book I honestly thought I was
reading an uncorrected proof but in the Acknowledgements section the author
references her editor, Justin Wood. A lot of these mistakes are blatant ones
that a simple spell check could have caught. Other times it's a little more
difficult to spot (not capitalizing names, forgetting apostrophes, or misusing
punctuation).
The author
crammed 54 chapters into 319 pages of text – 5.9 pages per chapter – which
resulted in me seeing the chapter number and thinking I had gotten a lot
further into the book than I actually had and then getting frustrated when I
saw the page number I was on. I know that this is a stylistic preference and
won't be an issue for some readers. Some notable writers use this style and it
works well for them (for example Lullaby
by Chuck Palahnuk averages the same number of pages per chapter), however there
are only approximately 200 words per page in this book meaning there really was
not a whole lot of substance to each of the chapters. Because of this, the
story itself ended up moving rather fast but not in a way that made me want to
keep reading to find out what was about to happen. It felt more like the author
wrote an outline for her novel and then made each point into one to three
sentences without adding any additional information.
The plot itself
was interesting and only had a few parts that genuinely bothered me. First,
how openly everyone discussed the
Witness Protection Program and how obvious it seemed that there was something
going on with the sisters (they claimed they were on vacation visiting their
cousin yet had 24/7 police escort and surveillance parked in front of their
house). The second thing was how incompetent O'Brien made the police. A handful
of times the police would give the sisters an order, the sisters would inform
them that they were not going to listen, and the cops would do nothing to try
and enforce their rule. The final issue I had with the plot had to do with O'Brien's
description of Inspector Daniels – a man who we are not allowed to forget for a
second is fat. He waddles, the chairs groan when he sits in them, his face is
round, his belly rotund. He needs help standing, gets winded easily, his
clothes are stained with food. I couldn't tell you what color hair he has,
what his race or age is, or even his first name, but I can tell you that he is
overweight and it seems as though the reader is supposed to dislike him for
that. Given that Daniels is such a minor character and O'Brien doesn't spend
any time describing anything else about him, it irks me immensely that she
spent so much time describing his weight in the most stereotypical and negative
manner, especially since the plot does not gain anything from knowing his
weight, let alone the constant reminder of it every time his character is
re-introduced.
One thing I did
enjoy a lot was the way O'Brien created the dialogue between the two sisters –
as someone with a similar age gap between my siblings and I, the dynamic
created there felt real to me. The way they talked to and interacted with each
other was very believable.
This book had a
lot of potential. The plot itself was interesting and I really enjoyed the
Canadian content. With proper editing and more meat to the plot, I would have
thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
Darkness Follows
ended with a twist, leaving interested readers wanting to get the next
installment. Me? I'm curious to see if in the next book O'Brien has improved upon
the things I disliked in the first, but I am certainly not holding my breath.
Reviewed by Taylor
