“This is my second shot at SGJ, and it’s another swing and a miss for me.
This book reads like that “Psychopath Test.”
This one:
While at the funeral of her own mother, a girl met a guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, so much her dream guy she believed him to be, that she fell in love with him then and there. A few days later, the girl killed her own sister. What is her motive in killing her sister?
Supposedly, if you’re a psychopath, you’ll immediately answer: So she can see the guy again! To non-psychopaths, the riddle doesn’t even make sense.
Anyway, NotM kind of reads like a drawn-out version of that idea. Which is okay, I can sort of dig that.
What I can’t dig as much is that the story REALLY skims over the part where the narrator decides to go forth with his very bad plan, and it spends A LOT of time with the narrator justifying his plan to you, the reader.
I just can’t hang with the thing where you’ve got the unreliable narrator and no external things that can give the reader a base in the fictional world. I need to know how off base this person is, at least ballpark. Look at that, two baseball analogies back to back. A double-header, if you will.
If the narrator isn’t reliable, and if the narrator is the sole source of information we get, I end up losing patience with the story. Because…what am I reading? Basically the inner thought process of someone who has an extremely flawed inner thought process.
Even at a slim 136 pages, it was too long for me.”