Can a ghost story be boring? Unfortunately, the answer is yes.
In The Sun Down Motel, Vivian works the night shift at the front desk of a creepy motel. She sees some ghosts haunting the place and starts digging around. Soon she realizes that some of the deaths around town may be connected. But one night, she disappears without a trace. Thirty-five years later, her niece Carly shows up, hoping to figure out what happened to her aunt. Carly also gets a job as a front desk clerk on the night shift. Soon she's digging around and being haunted by ghosts too.
This story bored me to sleep, literally. The problem is, if you take out the ghosts, not much happens. And the ghosts were mostly only there in the beginning of the story to precipitate the two girls' investigations.
The majority of the story centers around Vivian and Carly, each in their own timeline, putting their lives on hold to bumble around, sticking their noses where they don't belong. In Vivian's case, she zeroes in on a guy solely because she has a gut feeling that he's a bad person. Let's think about this for a second. If he really was the guilty party, then she's going around following a killer. If he's not guilty, then she's just harassing and stalking an innocent person. I know stories have to have some sort of premise in order to tell their tale, but this just stretched beyond credibility.
The two girls' parallel storylines have a lot of overlap, so it often feels like I'm being told something I already know. And it doesn't help that the two women have pretty much the same personality (extremely nosy and weirdly obsessed with digging into people's deaths beyond what is safe or healthy). More than once, I forgot whose point of view I was reading and it didn't really matter.
It's like watching a campy horror movie where you could see the main characters doing one stupid thing after another, and they just get more and more into trouble. And it's not clear why they are doing these things. Both can leave at anytime, especially when weird stuff starts happening. I don't understand their motivations, and it prevented me from connecting with them.
And even when the plot mercifully seems to have wrapped up, it somehow kept going on some more. There were extra unnecessary characters and ghosts who seem to have no purpose other than to make the story longer and more convoluted.
Lots of people loved this book, so this was clearly a case of it not being the right match for me. I trudged on when I should have quit. I thought it would get better, but it never did. I just couldn't get into it. The whole thing was unbelievable, and it exhausted me.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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