Reviews

This book was weird, for me it wasn’t a good weird. I’m not sure why it had elements that I should’ve liked such as doppelgängers, alternate realities, and liminal spaces.

This is essentially a sci-fi horror about a city that is sinking and research scientist, Tamsin Rivers, is tasked with finding out why it’s sinking starts to realize the dimensions of her own basement aren’t adding up.

She starts to become obsessed with distortions in her measurements, and one day discovers a door that was not in her basement before. Out of this door comes her elseworld double and she is everything Tamsin isn’t.

Being a scientist she starts to study this double and things escalate from there.

Basically you get sucked down this rabbit hole for several hundred pages leading to a rather lackluster ending.

Honestly I think this book had a good story in it but got distracted from itself.

I listened to this one audio which was by Xe Sands and I don’t really think this a narrator I vibe with at least in this story she felt stiff to me.

Has anyone read this that can change my mind?

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the opportunity to listen to this book early. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

bridge_books's review

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dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

aardwyrm's review

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Exactly what you expect from Starling, a severe, maladjusted lesbian getting scared and increasingly deranged for a few hundred pages. The parts that work are very good at being spooky. The story takes a long, long time to get engaging, and a lot of stuff doesn't go anywhere, not in an ambiguous horror kind of way but an oops forgot this thread kind of way. And the ending is kind of a whiff but really good endings are especially hard on this subgenre. There's a great book inside this pretty okay book but it needs a little excavation.