The premise itself isn't bad, and what this book suffers from more than anything else is extremely poor execution. That poor execution can be broken down into two major categories.

1. The protagonist is stupid.

Her family is living in the guest house on her parent's property. When a bad storm occurs, a woman shows up on her doorstep and Annie, against her better judgment, lets her in. But despite being incredibly suspicious of this stranger (who keeps making weird comments implying she's seen Annie before, then laughing it off), she neither asks the stranger to leave, nor goes to the main house so the two of them won't be alone. Yes, the storm is bad... but not that bad that you can't walk 100 feet to the main house so you're not stuck in a guest house with a stranger you increasingly do not trust.

Also, despite being distrustful of the stranger, Annie offers up a crazy amount of personal information completely voluntarily. Combine this with the previous paragraph and you get situations like the stranger going, "You and your family always look so happy together." To which Annie is like, "WTF you've never met my family before." And then the stranger says, "Oh, uh... blushes... I was just, uh... looking at that family photo on the wall and saying you look so happy!" To which Annie then, inexplicably offers up just a stupid amount of personal details about her life. "Oh yeah, well that was us in happier times. Right now my husband, who is currently working the late shift at the airport right now, and I are kind of fighting more often, and my son would rather spend time with his dad than me. BTW, my son is currently in the main house with our five other relatives right now." Girl, didn't you just say you're suspicious of this stranger in your home, and didn't she just say something hella sus that's making you nervous?


2. The author is trying to fill 300 pages of book with 50 pages of plot.

This is clearly meant to be a contained thriller... someone in your house and you can't escape and things start to descend into chaos really quickly. That's fine, but you have to have enough content to fill the kind of story you're trying to tell. The author clearly doesn't have any ideas about how to keep the narrative going beyond repeating the same events over and over again. First, the stranger makes a comment that raises Annie's suspicions. Then, Annie questions that comment. Next, the stranger demurs and comes up with a flimsy excuse for her clearly suspect comment. Finally, Annie then lets her concern go and proceeds to info-dump a ton of personal information onto the stranger. Then the cycle repeats.

I made it through four of those cycles before I realized that I still had more than 50% of the book left and nothing had actually happened in the previous 50% since the stranger showed up on her doorstep. Almost a hundred pages of the same thing over and over again with no raised stakes or new information. Just two characters sitting and chatting in a room together while a storm rages outside.




So I stopped reading. Does that mean I'll never find out how the stranger's and Annie's lives are "inextricably intertwined?" Yeah, and I'm okay with that. Am I giving up finding out whether Annie actually "loses everything" or not? Yep, and I don't even feel bad about it. This was a quintessential example of a "thriller" (the book's full title is literally Someone Else's Life: A Thriller) that is anything but. If I had to put it into a genre, I would probably say it's more of a "drama" although I say that not because the book is particularly dramatic... it's because "meets the minimum technical requirements to be considered a story" isn't a genre.

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Created Apr 06, 2024 at 12:18pm • Submit your own review...