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A review by mandykool
Middletide by Sarah Crouch
2.0
This was an okay book.
What this book is not: it’s not a thriller. There are some dark parts, like opening with a woman hanging from a tree - that’s horrific, but after that this book slowly unpeels each layer carefully.
What worked for me was the relationship between Elijah and Nakita. I was rooting for them from the beginning and their story was what initially pulled me in and kept me going.
What didn’t work for me: the twist. Not because of the twist, I was fine with the twist, but the first half of the book we had two very smart cops for a small town that quickly turned into idiots and the “evidence” in the case just didn’t add up. It felt like the author wasn’t invested in the mystery of the story and threw it in there to classify this at a literary thriller rather than just focusing on the important characters. Just my opinion.
I feel like if there is going to be a trial, the author needed at least 100 more pages to build that up and at less than 300 pages, it just wasn’t there. I’m trying not to get spoilery, but I had so many nitpicky issues with how the murder storyline played out when I was far more interested in the characters and the rest of the story.
What really didn’t work for me: I’m uncomfortable with what appears to be a white woman writing about the Pacific Northwest Indigenous People, but fictionalizing a tribe and using awful stereotypes. I can see where that may have been her idea to try and be respectful of tribal people, but that is kind of erasure in itself when working with a tribal person on her book could have been something she did. It doesn’t sit right with me and I’ll have a really hard time recommending this book for that alone, which is a bummer.
What this book is not: it’s not a thriller. There are some dark parts, like opening with a woman hanging from a tree - that’s horrific, but after that this book slowly unpeels each layer carefully.
What worked for me was the relationship between Elijah and Nakita. I was rooting for them from the beginning and their story was what initially pulled me in and kept me going.
What didn’t work for me: the twist. Not because of the twist, I was fine with the twist, but the first half of the book we had two very smart cops for a small town that quickly turned into idiots and the “evidence” in the case just didn’t add up. It felt like the author wasn’t invested in the mystery of the story and threw it in there to classify this at a literary thriller rather than just focusing on the important characters. Just my opinion.
I feel like if there is going to be a trial, the author needed at least 100 more pages to build that up and at less than 300 pages, it just wasn’t there. I’m trying not to get spoilery, but I had so many nitpicky issues with how the murder storyline played out when I was far more interested in the characters and the rest of the story.
What really didn’t work for me: I’m uncomfortable with what appears to be a white woman writing about the Pacific Northwest Indigenous People, but fictionalizing a tribe and using awful stereotypes. I can see where that may have been her idea to try and be respectful of tribal people, but that is kind of erasure in itself when working with a tribal person on her book could have been something she did. It doesn’t sit right with me and I’ll have a really hard time recommending this book for that alone, which is a bummer.