Ghana Aamir

(SPOILER ALERT) Hahh.. Alex betrayed me with this novel. The best thing about Alex Michaelides is that his stories are engrossing. You get absorbed. But the worst thing is: he butchered up his own story. I'd picked up on who the killer was after the second girl had died and I just read on to see how they'd be caught. But the last few chapters were both rushed and kind of uncalled for. The story could very well have gone in the direction that Zoe was killing all the Maidene to have Edward Fosca for herself (i know cliché, but that's where the story was heading), the Sebastian aspect really killed it for me. Plus that angle of the story wasn't much explored as well. Sebastian obviously had DID but there was not even a mention of that disorder anywhere within the story or any character with it. Only Mariana's attitude towards Sebastian was justified throughout the whole story because she was treating him the same way, she'd her father (ignoring all the wrongs and obsessing over the good, no matter how minimal or absent it was) and if this was the whole point of the story, then the novel was just needlessly long. And the novel was indeed needlessly long with a lot of unecessary fillers and no satisfactory exploration of any character. And everything just turned out right at the end of the story. Wow. And those non-consentual kisses... maaann... those actually gave me the ick and it's so common in novels written by male writers that I couldn't help but generalize. Women do not appreciate such men... plsss.. on the contrary, we get afraid of them. We don't want to be near such men at all or be alone with them but Mariana had no such reaction to either Fred or Fosca which seemed unnatural as if they'd not kissed her but her puppet doll. She didn't think about it, neither did she hate them as people after that. That angle of the story was totally unacceptable and unnatural for me. But again the good part of the story was that it was written by Alex. He writes in a way that absorbs you from the start and the psychological aspects of the story are always justified. But he'll have to work more on plotting though. I had same complaints with silent patient too.