Book Review: The Girl Before by J.P. Delaney

Right off the bat, I have to say that while the mystery/thriller genre isn’t necessarily one of my top favorite genres, I thoroughly enjoyed J.P. Delaney’s The Girl Before. At the same time, I can’t necessarily say that I think that this is a truly great book, especially the more I think about this book after having finished reading it about three weeks ago.

Prior to reading The Girl Before, I was very drawn to the premise of the book centering around two women living in the same house at two different points in time. (Emma, along with her boyfriend, Simon, were the previous tenants; and Jane moves into the house at the start of the book) The whole idea of the characters being able to live in a house, that while the house is very luxurious, there are a lot of really weird rules that the people living the house are expected to follow was also very interesting to me. Plus, Edward Monkford (The man who designed the house and owns it) has a rather elaborate screening process that involves having to answer a lot of rather odd questions that are featured at the beginning of each chapter throughout the book. The fact that the mystery that the book is ultimately centered around is, “What exactly happened to Emma?” is something that I quickly became very invested in once I started reading The Girl Before.

The Girl Before is definitely a book that has a lot of twists and turns that I really enjoyed for the most part. One thing that I found myself thinking about a lot when I read and reviewed Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Liane Moriarty’s Truly Madly Guilty is that the main characters in both of those books definitely weren’t exactly the most likable people, but that’s especially the case when it comes to the characters in The Girl on the Train. Initially, I thought that both Emma and Jane were both fairly likable for the most part, and I thought that they were also both very sympathetic characters, especially given the fact that they had both suffered a tragedy of some kind prior to moving into the house on One Folgate Street. (Emma was the sexually assaulted during a home invasion, and Jane had a baby that was stillborn.) When I first started reading The Girl Before, I really liked that Emma and Jane initially seemed like very likable people, since I feel like the characters in the other mystery/thriller novels that I’ve read in the past have all had the tendency to ultimately not be the most sympathetic and likable characters. However, as the overall plot of The Girl Before progressed, it became more and more clear to me that perhaps Emma and Jane weren’t as likable and innocent as I had initially thought that they were.

Book Review: Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty

I should probably start out this review by mentioning that Truly Madly Guilty is the first book by Liane Moriarty that I’ve ever read. Admittedly, I was somewhat hesitant to have Truly Madly Guilty be the first book by Liane Moriarty that I ever read since it has gotten a lot of mixed reviews. I had always planned on starting with her book Big Little Lies, but I ultimately decided to read Truly Madly Guilty first since it’s her most recent book. Because I’m very aware of the fact that this book has gotten a lot of mixed reviews, I went into reading Truly Madly Guilty telling myself that I shouldn’t necessarily view this book as being the sole determining factor when it comes deciding to how I feel about Moriarty’s writing in general; that being said, here are my thoughts on Truly Madly Guilty.

When I initially started reading Truly Madly Guilty, I was really enjoying it, and I honestly thought that I might end up being one of the people who loved the book. The overall premise of the book basically being about a barbecue gone wrong and how it affected the friendship between the two main characters, Clementine and Erika, really intrigued me and is what drew me to this book more than anything else. I also found the idea of what exactly happened at the barbecue being the mystery aspect of the book pretty cool. However, after a while, I definitely started to get very frustrated with how Moriarty really seemed to beat around the bush way too much when it came to a lot of the writing for the book; both when it came to how she would vaguely reference the incident at the barbecue in the chapters that took place after the barbecue and how she handled writing the chapters that took place on the day of the barbecue, but took place before the incident occurred at the barbecue. After a while, whenever a chapter would begin by indicating that it took place on the day of the barbecue, I found myself thinking, “Good lord, this sure is one long-ass day.” especially when none of the events that took place in some of those chapters was stuff that happened at the actual barbecue. The overall pacing of the plot really seemed to move at the same speed as storylines on soap operas move, which I found extremely frustrating at times.

None of the characters in Truly Madly Guilty are truly likable people, but that ultimately wasn’t the biggest complaint that I had about the book in the grand scheme of things. I’m not a person who’s necessarily completely turned off by characters in a story being unlikable, as long as the characters are intentionally being written as unlikable people, and the writing for the characters and the story overall is really good. After all, when it comes to what my favorite TV shows are, my #1 favorite comedy is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and I’m also a huge fan of the show Seinfeld. However, I’ll admit that when it comes to Truly Madly Guilty, I did have somewhat of a hard time getting truly attached to the characters in the book. I liked Clementine and Erika as a characters, but I definitely didn’t love them, and sometimes they did kind of get on my nerves; which I think is one of the reasons why I ultimately thought that this book was good, but not great.