14. The Searcher - Tana French
A retired Chicago cop moves to a remote part of Ireland to renovate an old farmhouse and hopefully have a quieter life following the breakdown of his marriage. But then a local teen seeks him out to help find her missing brother.
I have enjoyed the other Tana French books I've read (first two Dublin-murder squad books, Faithful Place) and while this book was okay, it was quite slow, with not much happening for about 80% of the book. The resolution was pretty much as expected too. So a little disappointing story-wise, but an okay read.
15. Girl A - Abigail Dean
Lex (Girl A) is a survivor of child abuse, after she and her six siblings were imprisoned and neglected by her religious-zealot father and baby-machine mother. After her mother dies it's up to Lex to get permission from the rest of her siblings to turn their old home into a community centre, so something good can come out of their experience.
Fortunately there's not much gratuitous focusing on the abuse in the book, although the implied stuff is bad enough. The story flips back and forth between the present day and the past, telling the story of the children's life before the abuse started, during and then the escape and aftermath, and how their current, adult lives are affected by it. And really that's the problem with this book: too much flipping back and forth in time zones, sometimes even paragraph to paragraph, made it difficult to keep track of what was happening when. Too many characters, and with the story being told by Lex, made it difficult to connect/care about any of them very much. Also some of the outcomes were quite unbelievable - how can Lex be so amazingly success career-wise while she is clearly still very messed up psychologically? And the ending was confusing.
Definitely my least favourite read so far this year. It also didn't help that I was reading this at the same time as listening to Educated on audiobook, and I kept getting the two stories mixed up!