2/5 stars
UGH
I WAS SO EXCITED FOR THIS BOOK
ONLY TO BE DISAPPOINTED
There are a few positives here:
- The writing was good. Very moody. Very suspenseful
- It's a cool concept; girls at a boarding school on an island suddenly begin experiencing strange and gruesome injuries, are quarantined, and then have to learn how to fend for themselves and survive in their hostile environment
- The main character's name is Hetty, which is a cool name.
- The cover is incredible and beautiful and 82% of the reason I read this book
Okay that's all I've got.
Below here is SPOILERS because I couldn't properly complain about the book without referencing specific events so watch out. These are pretty major spoilers, as in I basically tell you the entire plot:
Our lovely main character Hetty is a terrible person. And not in a cool anti-hero main character way. In a "I'm supposed to root for this main character and want her to survive but I really don't want to and she really doesn't deserve to survive" kind of way. She is fine for about the first half of the book. Obviously these are difficult circumstances and all of the girls have had to learn how to be tough and survive and look out for themselves. So anything that Hetty does for about the first half I can understand.
Then some other stuff goes down, and even then I am willing to excuse Hetty for doing what she can to survive and to help her friends survive, but then all Hetty does is complain about the GUILT. How she's so GUILTY for keeping food from the other girls as part of the boat crew and she's so GUILTY for killing Reese's father and then being terrible about it to Reese and she's oh so GUILTY for breaking quarantine and causing everyone on the island to die. The GUILT will just EAT her ALIVE. If you feel so GUILTY about it Hetty, then maybe you shouldn't have done it in the first place, or do something about it now to fix it.
But really the final straw for Hetty and me came towards the end (massive spoiler for how the book ends). When Hetty and Reese sneak away from the other girls to get the boat and escape the island, I was just done. They knew for a 100% fact that all of the girls were going to die, and they didn't even do a thing to try to help them or tell them that they knew how to get off the island. They just left. I know the boat probably couldn't have fit that many girls, but it would have fit some, and who knows they could have found another boat. It just made my blood boil that they didn't even attempt to help all of the other girls, instead only focusing on themselves and their own survival in the face of literally all of their friends' deaths.
Hetty and one of her best friends, Reese, begin a romantic relationship, and it's supposed to be a complicated, tense kind of relationship, but I just didn't get it at all. They had no chemistry or anything that led me to think that either of them would have any sort of feelings for each other until I was told by the author that apparently Hetty had been in love with Reese since the moment she met her, and Reese with Hetty. News to me. I just didn't get it at all.
And then the ending (besides just the part about Hetty) was just not good. We only kind of found out why all of this stuff was happening (like the injuries and all) to Hetty and the rest of the girls, and it was the ultimate underwhelming answer. It made a lot of the rest of the book seem more boring in hindsight.
So this book was kinda cool because of the unique concept and the good writing that really added to the suspenseful atmosphere of horror, but overall I couldn't get behind the main character Hetty at all, and the ending made the entire book underwhelming.
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