Great book! Loved this.

Quick read, not as much mystery as expected but still a good book overall. Will be checking out more by the author.

Thank you to LibraryThing and Richard Farrell for the ARC. ( )

This was not what I expected but it kept me intrigued until the very end. I found a great many typos and grammatical errors which was surprising. Overall it’s an interesting story and raises questions about living an authentic life and also moving toward an acceptance of death. ( )

Wow, I hated this and I wish I had stopped about half way through when it started getting too introspective and dull, but I read a review that said to keep going because it was worth it. No, no it was not.

I was expecting a mystery but there isn't one. Or rather, there could be if it was treated as one but instead of going through the search with Radford, we get to read about him sitting in his hotel room and whining to himself while writing reports. When he's asked if he's investigated a particular line of questioning, he answers sure, four times already. When? We never see it.

So the mystery is a bust which leave this book with the introspective "meaning of life" that Erin is chosen to pontificate on even though it all smells like bullshit. Basically, her advice is that everyone should have a regular mid-life crisis. Cool. But of course her advice makes Radford, who we are told several times never looked at another woman besides his wife, want to have an affair with her and, while he does not, he does open himself up emotionally to her, vulnerable with her as he hasn't been with anyone else in ages. Dude, your wife is literally begging for you to open up to her and have some emotional connection from you and you give it to a woman who is basically having a mental break because of trauma. Awesome.

I like introspective, character-study books. But you need to have a character to connect with to make it successful. While I get a tiny bit of Erin's motivations (not wanting her family to deal with her death a third time), that seems like such a tiny bit of her reasoning and the rest ("I'm finally awake because birds chirping and making designs with sticks makes me happy!") comes across as not-even-philosophy-101 nonsense. So yeah, can't connect to her. Radford, I get some parts of him (because I have a workaholic spouse) but his constant self-pity, his weird and uncomfortable hero worship of Dickie Gray, and his stubborn reluctance to actually do his job in the first third makes him very unsympathetic.

No mystery, unlikeable characters, bullshit-grade introspection... this book had it all and I wanted exactly none of it. ( )

This was a super easy and quick read but it ultimately it fell a bit flat for me.

I always feel a bit weird about rating books low when it's partly because the book wasn't what I expected. This book is described as a mystery but there just isn't that much mystery. This book is duel perspective so we find out basically right away what is happening with the falling woman. The only other mystery would be why the plane crashed but that is clearly not the focus of the book. I don't think I would have enjoyed this more if I knew there wasn't much mystery going in but it was a bit disappointing because the set up for this was so original and I wanted to see how it played out.

I also didn't love the characters. Charlie was fine but I still feel like I didn't understand him as much as I wanted to by the end of this book. My real problem was with Erin. I like reading about characters that make decisions I would never make because then I can think through those decisions so I'm not upset that I didn't find her likeable. My problem was that I wasn't satisfied with the way her choices were explored. The book summary on my copy said this was about peoples right to privacy and making their own choices but I just didn't feel like that was fleshed out well at all. It seemed like there was conflicting reasons for her wanting to disappear and I wanted to dig into that a bit more. The marriage parts of this book I really couldn't care less about. I really hated the conclusion of Charlie's marriage plot I really didn't like that he ended up having a kid on the way because some people just don't want kids! And they don't need to be pushed into having one. You should also talk about those sorts of decisions before you marry someone. and I just kept wanting this to be more of a mystery than it was.

Even this didn't end up really working for me, I would consider reading more by this author. This was an easy book to get through and the writing was pretty good. It was a little too flowery in parts but I think if I went into a different book by this author I would enjoy it at least as much as this one. ( )