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| 📕10-word summary: Man stuck in time loop until he solves a murder. 🖌6-word review: Interesting premise. Complicated execution. Tedious reading. |
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| 💭Favorite quote: “Thankfully, the leaves and twigs are so demoralized by the earlier rain they don’t have the heart to cry out beneath my feet.” | |||||||||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: brazier | |||||||||
| Description:* Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11:00 p.m. There are eight days, and eight witnesses for you to inhabit. We will only let you escape once you tell us the name of the killer. Understood? Then let’s begin… Evelyn Hardcastle will die. Every day until Aiden Bishop can identify her killer and break the cycle. But every time the day begins again, Aiden wakes up in the body of a different guest. And some of his hosts are more helpful than others…*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||||||||
| Thoughts: If, like me, the title of this book reminds you of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, disabuse yourself right now of any notion of a connection between the two books. There isn’t any. It took me a while to get the rhythm of how the storyline in this book was going to work, and the dealbreaker for me was the one chapter that was solely exposition of the time- and body-traveling rules. I mean, if you have to stop the story with a chapter explaining how a device — which you’re purportedly employing to enhance your narrative — is going to work, maybe that’s a little too heavy-handed writing. It suspended my effort to suspend my disbelief with the sort of reading equivalent of breaking the fourth wall in theater.
Tedious, annoying, distracting: 1) I found it tedious that there were 8 “hosts” (i.e., other characters’ bodies) that the protagonist inhabited during the story, but then there were a couple of bodies he “visited” more than once. End it already. 2) Overuse of the word “conspiratorial” (or its derivative) in writing is annoying to me, and there were three instances of it in this book. Nobody whispers and conspires that much. 3) This is the second audiobook by a British author that I’ve listened to recently in which I found distracting the pronunciation of these words as “enna-thing,” “enna-one,” and “evra-thing.” Is that how all Brits say those words? I don’t think so. |
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See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.