GENRE: Fiction/Thriller
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: F
SYNOPSIS: Delighted by a surprise invitation, Miriam Macy sails off to a luxurious private island off the coast of Mexico with six other strangers. Surrounded by miles of open water in the gloriously green Sea of Cortez, Miriam is soon shocked to discover that she and the rest of her companions have been brought to the remote island under false pretenses—and all seven strangers harbor a secret.
Danger lurks in the lush forest and in the halls and bedrooms of the lonely mansion. Sporadic cell-phone coverage and miles of ocean keeps the group trapped in paradise. And strange accidents stir suspicions, as one by one . . .
MY THOUGHTS: This story is a retelling of the 1939 Agatha Christie novel And Then There Were None. The plot of this book is this: someone has invited seven strangers in the USA, black, white, Hispanic, to live in a mansion called Artemis, on an island off the coast of Mexico, for three days. Each person was given a different reason for being invited there and they don't know it but they're there under false pretenses. They don't know either that the person who invited them has set out to punish each and every one of them for past sins. Each person represents one of the seven deadly sins and they're being taken out one by one.
Mimi is just an awful character. Every thought she has about the other six people is critical and superficial. She's a mess mentally based on things we learn about her towards the end and she certainly deserved to be on that island. The stuff going on with her before she leaves for her trip that involves her daughter is ridiculous and is another example of her issue with race, which I talk more about below. I just don't see any point in all that backstory. We're told by her ex-husband that she makes things up but aren't given any examples so we don't know if it's true or not.
I really like unlikable characters sometimes, and villains, but I didn't care for any in here, and all but one, Wallace, was unlikable to me. The dialogue was awful, the characters, uninteresting, there was no suspense, nothing.
The black author clearly has an issue with race. She mentioned about four or five times within the first thirty pages that the main character Miriam, aka Mimi, is black. The plot of the story has nothing to do with ethnicity. Nothing. Mimi has made some stupid comments like this, about educated black character Frank, from page 197, "But there he was, stuttering and sweating like a guilty son of a bitch from the ghetto, caught red-handed and flecked with the blood of a white woman, a Richard Wright character come to life." Another comment that bothered me was this, on page 221 of the paperback, about Frank and a white character named Eddie, "He was a big man, an angry man, who now stood over a naked , unmoving black man. 1717, 1817, 1917, today...This was a timeless American image." WTF is she talking about? The character was helping him out of the hot tub and the character's making a slavery comment/comparison? Get the fuck out of here with that, Rachel. While trying to figure out which of the seven deadly sins she represents, she says this, page 239, "Pride? Okay. A little. But that wasn't a problem-I needed a very healthy amount of self-esteem to be black and female in America." There's a few more comments at the beginning about her being a black woman, but I don't remember what they are. The author also made a white police officer the murderer of an innocent black man. Overkill, overkill, overkill. I'm surprised but at the same time not, that no one in any of the reviews I read, mentioned any of that.
The ending of this is different than And Then There Were None, so I give the author credit for that since I liked it. I liked Wallace too. But Agatha's laughing at you from her grave for your poor attempt at a remake of her classic. No way, no how would I ever read this author again.
I received this from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment