As my birthday gift to myself for 2022, I signed up for Book of the Month. I figured it would help me at minimum with the goal of reading a book a month as well as introduce me to new authors and content to read. You get to pick from a set of books each month, so you have some control to make sure you’ll have a better chance of enjoying the content. You can also add additional books if you so desire. This post is not sponsored by Book of the Month, but if you’re interested please join me! If you use my link, you can see what’s in my next box!
My January book choice was Reckless Girls, by Rachel Hawkins. It promised a cursed island with a history of cannibalism, bad decisions and the “spine-tingling reimagining of an Agatha Christie classic” (per the dust jacket). That sounds right up my alley so into my cart it went!
My first hurdle was that it’s set first in Hawaii but primarily on a remote island in the Pacific. A tropical paradise. Too bad for me, over a foot of snow plus record cold days happened in my neighborhood. I just couldn’t feel the warmth.
No matter, though, I was determined to power through. The book develops along the story of Lux, who ends up on the remote island with her boyfriend and a cast of characters she only just met. The book flashes back in time to establish who these other characters are, cutting between the present and the past. It takes quite a while to get going and it starts to feel like a bait and switch. I was expecting a thriller with plenty of murder and what I gained was a lot of interpersonal relationships and character building.
If you make it through everyone’s background stories, the book does eventually deliver on the murders… but it almost feels like a secondary story to the history of each character. All in all, I was not thrilled. Reckless Girls did not deliver on the spine-tingling story that I was promised. This book just was not for me, although it did inspire me to revisit Agatha Christie’s stories.