manas's Reviews > Beautiful Ugly

thank you netgalley and macmillan for the arc!

➳ 2 ☆

this novel starts out with a missing wife and a husband who is desperate to find out what happened to her. grady green—an author—finds himself on a reclusive private island in the scottish area, hoping to write a novel after this tragedy. it is told in dual first person POV between abby (the wife) before she went missing, and grady (past & present).

i have read five alice feeney novels and in my opinion, they aren’t anything super special and have a tendency to be redundant and repetitive. for 65% of this novel, there is quite literally NOTHING happening in regards to the characters or the plot. after that, there is a plot twist, which i was able to predict even before i started the book. entail, this leaves the ending to be very jarring and bereft with an unsatisfying confusion to the narrative. i saw many reviews saying the last sentence ties this together, however, that one sentence made me more confused than i already was.

all in all, i do not hate the book, but there is too much melodrama and theatrical antics for a thriller. seeing as this is my favorite genre, i am usually quite peculiar about the ways i like these novels to be constructed. the atmosphere was adequate and the setting was pleasant. other than that; the characters mannerisms and deportment were not a strong suit for this book and could’ve used less inessential monologue. lastly, her books have a tendency to over use certain facile plot devices. unfortunately, this had the overall prose to be lacking, which is a shame because there was a potential for this to be a good winter thriller.