The Other People starts off with Gabe searching for his daughter Izzy. Three years earlier, he was driving home when he saw his daughter's face in the backseat of an old car. He lost the car in the ensuing chase, and arriving home, he found out that his wife and daughter had supposedly been murdered. But Gabe knows in his heart that his daughter is still alive out there, and he's been looking for her ever since.
The premise is super interesting, but I wonder if this is a case where the story just couldn't quite live up to the hype. In addition to Gabe's story line, we also follows two others: a waitress at a service station, and a mother on the run with her daughter. I found the story lines to be more or less entertaining, though a bit bland. The switching between them felt disjointed to me, and as a result, I never quite bonded with any of the characters.
Once the different stories started to converge, there were a lot of coincidences and many of them were far-fetched. The story seemed to go one way with "the other people", but then towards the end, a paranormal element was thrown in that felt jarring and odd. The ending was very drawn out, with multiple explanations necessary to account for everything. It was all rather complicated, and I'm not sure I grasped it all.
In the end, this was a diverting story, as long as you can suspend your beliefs and don't look too closely at the explanation. It was a fun few hours of reading, but I wish I had found it more compelling and thrilling.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
0 comments:
Post a Comment