The Likeness was honestly a bit of a disappointment for me. This was my first Tana French book and I've been hearing wonderful things about her for ages. The first hundred or so pages of The Likeness seemed promising. The characters were interesting, particularly the main character Cassie, and I was intrigued enough to be patient about the fact it was taking ages to get to the murder described in the blurb.

Things started to go downhill for me around the 35-40% mark. There was a lot of tension in the book between whether the story was dark academia or a murder mystery. I've read plenty of dark academia books that include murder but the story typically frames the crime as something the reader will learn more about as the story unfolds rather than something the main character is supposed to be actively trying to solve.

This brings me to what is probably my number one gripe about The Likeness. Cassie is a HORRIBLE detective. She regularly forgets that she's undercover for the express purpose of finding some suspects in the murder of Lexie Madison. Cassie doesn't do a lot of sleuthing and the amount of disassociating she does while undercover just never made sense. It wasn't clear to me if Cassie was supposed to be an unreliable narrator or if she was just incredibly bad at remembering why she was undercover. As this is the premise the whole story hinges on, the fact that it didn't make sense to me made enjoying The Likeness increasingly difficult as time went on.

I had really hoped that the traditional wrap-up at the end of a mystery would explain this but was disappointed there as well.

If you like a slow burn mystery, this is the book for you. Satisfying ending, good characters.

First I just wanna say that the audiobook was fantastic, Heather O’Neill is an amazing narrator. Probably one of the best I’ve heard so far. 

The Likeness is a thriller, but instead of the exciting fast-paced climax and resolutions I’m used to, it was more akin to a train slowly chugging along quietly enveloping you in the story. And despite it being a murder mystery and knowing the housemates are suspects, the more I read about them the more that enveloping feeling became a sense of sadness because I really felt how much they cared about each other through it all and the hope that they were innocent even though I knew it was very unlikely. This dichotomy of feelings is something I really appreciated, and I kinda love when books are able to make me feel this way. 

I also really liked how Tana French didn’t try to outsmart readers and make the mystery too difficult to solve. I think I picked up on who the culprits were, or at least suspected, early on, a bit through picking up clues but mostly because I’ve read Donna Tart before. So this is maybe less about my intelligence and more about my experience lmao. 

it is interesting how i have read both the first and second book and dislike the main character the most - probably because i can see how stupid they are being and when it is a crime novel, its A BIG DEAL hahaha. but overall, a good crime novel, super interesting and engaging. i liked the concept of a look-a-like and i actually liked that not perfectly wrapped up ending 

Much better than the first book, and better than The Secret History (they have similar tropes/stories), but still fell a bit short for me. The unrealistic premise didn’t bother me, but I felt a bit cheated in the end finding out the full story of what happened to Lexie, as I guessed the gist of it from the beginning. Also, the back cover made the book sound much more of a psychological thriller than it was. I really liked the intense and complicated relationships between all the characters but overall it’s not something I’d highly recommend to someone.